Designing a corporate travel programme from scratch

If you are building a corporate travel programme from a blank page, the temptation is to start with the supplier deals. Resist it. The supplier deals are downstream of the programme structure, and a well-structured programme with average rates outperforms a poorly-structured one with great rates every time. The order in which you make the foundational decisions is what determines whether your programme compounds value or quietly leaks it.

Start with the policy, in two pages

A two-page policy covering booking workflow, advance purchase, class of service, hotel caps, ground transport and exception process is enough for 90% of organisations. Write it for travellers, not lawyers. If a traveller cannot understand it on first read, it is too long. Pilot it with a sample group for 30 days before rolling it out widely — there will always be edge cases the first draft missed.

Decide your booking workflow before you choose your TMC

Online for simple point-to-point, offline for complex routings, hybrid for groups and executive. The right TMC fits your workflow; the wrong process forces your travellers around the TMC and creates the leakage you were trying to prevent. The most common mistake is choosing the TMC first and discovering afterwards that their workflow does not fit how your travellers actually book.

Approvers: fewer, faster, accountable

Multi-step approval chains slow bookings without improving compliance. One approver per cost centre, with a 24-hour SLA, works better than three approvers with no SLA. Approval should be a verification of business need, not a re-pricing exercise — the policy and the workflow should already have priced the booking correctly.

Reporting cadence

• Weekly: exceptions and at-risk bookings; goes to the travel programme owner only
• Monthly: spend vs budget, top routes, compliance rate; goes to finance and the programme owner
• Quarterly: supplier performance, programme health, recommendations; goes to leadership
• Annually: full review with renegotiation of supplier deals and benchmark refresh

SLAs that actually matter

• Quote turnaround: 2 hours in business hours, 4 hours after-hours
• Booking confirmation: same business day
• Change handling: 1 hour acknowledgement, resolution within 4
• Documentation pack: delivered 72 hours before departure
• Monthly reporting: 5th working day of the following month
• Incident response: under 15 minutes from first contact, 24/7

The 90-day plan after launch

First 30 days, measure adoption. Are travellers using the workflow, or routing around it? Second 30 days, measure compliance and exception reasons. Third 30 days, refine the policy with the data you now have, and re-brief travellers on what changed and why. A programme that survives its first 90 days unchanged is usually a programme that nobody is paying attention to.

What we do differently

Tulla designs programmes around how an organisation actually operates — board-level executive movement, donor-funded field travel, cross-border project deployments, group missions — and writes the policy, the workflow and the SLA framework against that reality. The programme is then run by the same desk that designed it, so accountability for outcomes does not change hands at handover.