It’s a known fact that keeping track of employee’s unused tickets is undeniably difficult. Most companies struggle with employees who will purchase and or cancel directly with the airlines (usually against company policy), or those that chose not to do anything when a trip is cancelled. If and when these situations occur, Travel Management Companies cannot obtain ticket information for future use. Travelers often don’t say anything until they receive their credit card statement and are seeking compensation for the cancelled trip.
Due to the many tickets that are written off due to lack of re-use or not recalled by the TMC, our organization needed to come up with a sure fire way to use up the hundreds of tickets before they expire. We have incorporated these unused non-refundable tickets directly into the travelers profile to ensure these “credits” will be used toward the next trip. We have done this by using a scraping method of the GDS by looking for our ARC numbers and then compiling a report. The report is then uploaded into the travelers’ profile each week for all users who have access to their profile to see.
In the past, these tickets weren’t as accessible and the process to create a report was cumbersome and slow. This inhibited travelers or arrangers from accessing a reliable database of unused tickets. Often, the TMC didn’t have accurate information, especially on partially used tickets.
Since the majority of our tickets are issued through our on-line booking tool, we now anticipate that the current bank of over $500K will deplete because of the obvious visibility into these tickets. The new system actually prompts the traveler or arranger to use up the tickets for that traveler, if at all possible.
It is our goal to deplete the file by 50% by the end of the fiscal year. Stay tuned…..
by Stefanie Tretola