tmcmatchCorporate travel companies, compared
Eleven axes on which UK corporate travel companies actually differ, each stated as the question you ask and the way you check the answer. Four of them have a free public register behind them. Seven do not, and this page says which.
Key points
- Compare contracting entities, not brands. Trading names outlive companies and the entity is what your contract binds.
- ATOL, ABTA and IATA are a licence, a membership and an accreditation. Not three versions of one thing.
- Financial protection on business travel is a contract term, not a statutory default.
- Seven of the eleven axes are supplier-stated. Turn each of those into a demonstration or a contract clause, not a claim.
- Ask about exit before you sign. It is the only moment it is negotiable.
The eleven criteria
| Axis | The question | Why it decides anything | How to verify the answer |
|---|---|---|---|
| Licences and accreditations | Which of ATOL, ABTA and IATA do you hold, and under which legal entity? | These three are constantly listed together and are three different things: a statutory licence, a trade association membership, and an airline ticketing accreditation. Only the first is a licence. | CAA ATOL holder search, ABTA member search, and the entity name on Companies House. Check the entity, not the brand. Source → |
| Legal entity and incorporation | Which registered company will we be contracting with, and what is its number? | Trading names outlive companies. The entity on the contract is the entity whose accounts and charges you should be reading. | Companies House: incorporation date, filing history, accounts type and any charges registered against the company. Source → |
| Scale and office footprint | How many staff, in how many offices, and which of those offices would serve us? | Headcount tells you about resilience; the office that serves you tells you about the hours you are actually covered for. | Employee numbers appear in filed accounts for companies above the small-company thresholds. Ask for the servicing office by name. Source → |
| Consultant experience | What is the average length of service of the consultants on our account? | This is the axis the reference directory publishes and nobody compares. Complex multi-sector itineraries are re-priced by a human, and experience is what decides whether that re-pricing happens. | Not independently verifiable. Ask for it as a contractual service level with a named team, not as a marketing statistic. |
| Booking technology and settlement | Which GDS, which online booking tool, and which expense system do you integrate with natively? | A native integration and a CSV export are both called an integration. One of them reconciles itself. | Ask to see a live reconciliation between the booking tool and the expense system during the demo, with your own data if possible. |
| Out-of-hours cover | Who answers at 03:00, in which country, on whose payroll, and at what charge? | Almost every supplier advertises 24-hour support. The differences are whether it is in-house or subcontracted, whether it is charged per call, and whether the person answering can see your policy. | Ask for the out-of-hours number during the tender and ring it out of hours. |
| Traveller tracking and duty of care | How would you tell us, within an hour, who of ours is inside a given city? | The employer's duty under s.2(1) of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 does not transfer to the agency. The agency's tooling is how the employer discharges it. | Ask for a live demonstration against a test itinerary, not a screenshot. Source → |
| Financial protection of your money | Where do our lodged funds and deposits sit, and what protects them? | Business travel booked under a general business travel agreement falls outside the Package Travel Regulations 2018 and may fall outside ATOL. The protection a consumer would have is not automatically there. | Read reg 3(2)(c) of the 2018 Regulations and reg 10(1)(h) of the ATOL Regulations, then ask the supplier which of them it is relying on. Source → |
| Fee model and supplier income | Which fee model, and what supplier remuneration arising from our programme do you retain? | The invoice is only part of the economics. Retained commission and override income is the part that is not on it. | Ask for it in writing in the tender response, and make the answer a contractual disclosure obligation rather than a statement. |
| VAT treatment | Will supplies to us be accounted for under the Tour Operators Margin Scheme? | A business customer cannot recover input VAT on a supply accounted for under TOMS. That changes the real cost of the same headline price. | VAT Notice 709/5 paragraph 4.19 requires a TOMS supply sold to a business to carry a reference on the invoice indicating TOMS has been applied. Look for it on a sample invoice. Source → |
| Data, reporting and exit | On the day the contract ends, what data do we get back, in what format, and how fast? | Three years of booking history is the asset that makes the next tender competitive. If it is trapped, the incumbent has a structural advantage in its own renewal. | Make it a contract clause with a named format and a number of days, agreed before signature. |
6 of the 11 rows end in a link to something you can read without asking anyone. The other 5 are answered by the supplier, and the useful form of each of those is not a better answer — it is a demonstration during the tender or a clause in the contract.
The four you do not have to take on trust
Holds an ATOL
Returns the licence number, the trading names it covers and the licence status. A supplier that books flight-inclusive packages for you and is not on it is either exempt under reg 10 or should not be doing it.
CAA ATOL holder search →ABTA member
ABTA is a trade association, not a statutory regulator. Membership brings a code of conduct and, for non-flight arrangements, a financial protection scheme. It is not a licence and it is not ATOL.
ABTA member search →IATA accredited
An IATA numeric code means the agency is accredited to issue airline tickets on IATA carriers' stock and settles through BSP. It is an industry accreditation about ticketing and settlement, not a consumer protection scheme.
IATA accreditation →Financially sound enough to hold your money
Filed accounts, filing history, charges registered against the company, and the incorporation date. Free, and the one register that tells you whether the company that holds your lodged funds has ever filed a full set of accounts.
Companies House →Check the entity, not the brandA group may trade under several names and hold its licence in one of them. The name on your contract is the one whose accounts, filings and charges you should be reading, and it is not always the name on the website.
The minimum standard
The reference directory in this market publishes a single sentence declaring what every listed agency offers. Publishing a standard is free credibility and costs nothing to keep true, provided the standard is about verifiable facts rather than quality. This is ours, and there is nothing in it that a supplier cannot simply state:
- Trades through a UK-registered company, and tells you which one.
- Holds whichever of ATOL, ABTA or IATA its booking model requires, or can say in writing which exemption it relies on instead.
- Provides an out-of-hours contact route that is reachable outside 09:00–17:00 UK time.
- Can produce, on request, a report of who is travelling where on a given date.
- States its fee model in writing before contract, including change and refund charges.
Note what is not in that list: no claim about being good, no rating, no award, no years of experience. Those are not standards, they are adjectives, and a standard you cannot check is a sentence rather than a threshold.
We are paid a fixed fee for each enquiry, agreed before it is sent, identical across every supplier that advertises here and unaffected by whether anything is signed. That is why this page is a set of criteria rather than a league table: there is no ordering of suppliers that pays us better, and we hold no data that would justify one anyway.
Want these answered by suppliers rather than by us?
Send the requirement and ask them to respond against these eleven axes. Five clicks, contact details last.
Why there is no table of named suppliers here
Because of the 5 rows above that no register covers.
Headcount, office counts, average consultant experience and technology stacks are supplier-stated figures with nothing to check them against, and nothing tells a reader when one of them went stale. Putting them in a table does not make them true; it lends them the authority of a table. The directory this site was built against does exactly that, for every supplier it lists, and has never rendered a table anyway.
The criteria and the registers are the part that does not go stale, so that is what is published. If supplier rows are added later they will carry a source per field, a date, and an explicit label on every value that is supplier-stated rather than verified — and they will be ordered alphabetically, because we have no basis for any other order and no interest in pretending otherwise.
The full list of what this site will not print.
Using this in a tender
The eleven axes are the structure of the free RFP and ITT template, so suppliers answer them in writing in a form that lines up side by side. Three of them are worth doing yourself rather than asking:
- Look the contracting entity up on Companies House before the first meeting. Incorporation date, accounts, charges. Five minutes, free.
- Search the CAA and ABTA registers for the entity name, not the brand.
- Ring the out-of-hours number, out of hours. Nobody does this and it answers more than the question it asks.
Common questions
How do you compare corporate travel companies?
On eleven axes, of which four can be verified against a free public register and seven cannot. The four verifiable ones are licences and accreditations (the CAA ATOL holder search and the ABTA member search), the contracting legal entity and its filings (Companies House), scale where the company is large enough to file employee numbers, and the financial protection position, which is a question about which regulation the supplier is relying on. The other seven — consultant experience, technology, out-of-hours arrangements, tracking, fee model, VAT treatment and exit terms — are answered by the supplier, which is why the useful version of each is a demonstration or a contract term rather than a claim.
What is the minimum a corporate travel company should offer?
The entry standard on this page: a named UK-registered contracting entity, whichever of ATOL, ABTA or IATA its booking model requires or a written statement of the exemption it relies on, a contactable out-of-hours route, the ability to report on demand who is travelling where, and its fee model in writing before contract including change and refund charges. Every one of those is a fact rather than a quality claim, which is the only kind of standard worth publishing.
Do you rank or score suppliers?
No. We publish no rankings, scores, stars, reviews or awards, and we do not operate a shortlisting service. We hold no data that would substantiate a ranking, and a ranking published by a site paid by the companies being ranked would be worth nothing even if we did.
Why is there no list of named suppliers on this page?
Because of the seven axes above that have no public register behind them. Publishing supplier-stated headcounts, technology stacks and consultant-experience figures in a table lends them an authority they have not earned, and nothing tells a reader when any of them went stale. The criteria and the verification routes are the durable part, so that is what is published.
What is the difference between a corporate travel company and a TMC?
In the UK market, nothing useful. The terms are used interchangeably by suppliers themselves. What is worth distinguishing is the contracting model — a standing agreement versus buying trip by trip — because that is what the regulations turn on.
Should we use a big supplier or a small one?
There is no general answer and anyone giving you one is selling something. Scale buys resilience, negotiated content and out-of-hours depth; a smaller supplier is more likely to give you a named team that knows your programme. What decides it is which of your eleven answers matter most, which is why the table is a table rather than a recommendation.
How many suppliers should we approach?
Enough that the exercise is a comparison and few enough that each response is properly evaluated. If you use the enquiry form on this site it goes to no more than three, once each. If you run your own process the number is yours to choose, and the free tender template makes the responses comparable however many you send it to.
What should we check before signing?
The contracting entity on Companies House, the licence position on the CAA and ABTA registers, a sample invoice for the VAT treatment, a live traveller-tracking demonstration against a test itinerary, and the out-of-hours number rung out of hours. All five are free and all five are done before signature or not at all.
Sources cited on this page
- CAA — ATOL holder search
- ABTA — find a member
- IATA — accreditation for travel agents
- Companies House — company information service
- Civil Aviation (ATOL) Regulations 2012, reg 10
- Package Travel and Linked Travel Arrangements Regulations 2018, reg 3
- VAT Notice 709/5 — Tour Operators Margin Scheme
- Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, s.2
Every figure above was read from the source it is attributed to on 20 September 2026. How we check this.
Send your requirement
Five questions you answer by clicking. Company and contact details are the last step, never the first.
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Here is what happens after you submit:
- Your answers go to travel management companies advertising on this site.
- No more than three of them may contact you, once each, about this requirement.
- You decide who, if anyone, you speak to. You are committed to nothing.
We are not a travel management company and we do not book travel.