Booking corporate travel looks a lot easier than it actually is.

Whether you are talking about playing quality golf, cooking a gourmet meal, playing a violin or adding an entertainment theater to your house, professionals are paid huge sums of money to make their finely honed skills appear routine and commonplace.

Booking corporate travel is no different. The advent of online booking tools only reinforced the notion that booking an airline ticket, a hotel and a car could be done by a chimpanzee trained to hit three buttons in the proper order. But here’s the rub. The airfare might well be $400 higher because the monkey had no idea that a flight into John Wayne airport was significantly cheaper than LAX. The hotel might well be twenty miles and 45 minutes from your meeting place and the car might be booked for the day after you arrive. Sound familiar?

When a company starts spending significant sums on travel, rest assured some well-intentioned executive will pop up with the not so revolutionary suggestion that since we travel so much, we should just handle it ourselves. They will quote the low transaction fee of an online agency as justification for making this precipitous leap. That is analogous to an inexperienced sailor becoming fixated by the tip of an iceberg and ramming the ship into the ninety percent of the ice flow below the waterline.

Is it realistic to expect an administrative assistant, however bright, for whom travel is just one of many responsibilities, to book travel with the same speed, accuracy and creative faring as a professional corporate travel agent who has been doing this task all day, every day for fifteen years?

It makes about as much sense as hiring some fresh-faced intern and explaining that their duties will entail answering the phone, doing some filing and, oh by the way, performing a little brain surgery.

Our agents average over twenty-five years of experience and are among the best in the industry. If you are looking to save money, improve employee productivity and realize a return on investment for your travel spend, we have the experience and expertise to make that happen.