The complete guide to switching your travel management company — timelines, what to ask, and how to move without disrupting a single traveler.
Corporate travel management is one of those things that tends to deteriorate slowly. Your TMC was fine when you signed up. Then response times got a little slower. Then you realized no one on their side actually knows your travelers. Then a $875 nonrefundable ticket sat unused because no one was tracking credits. By the time it becomes a real problem, you've often been tolerating it for months.
Here are the most common signs that your current setup isn't working — drawn from conversations with companies that made the switch:
When a traveler has an urgent booking issue at 8pm before an early flight, "we'll get back to you within 24 hours" isn't an answer. If your TMC doesn't have a real after-hours number that someone picks up, that's a problem.
Every call starts with re-explaining who you are, what your policy is, and what you need. If you're talking to a different agent every time, you're being handled by a call center — not managed by a dedicated team.
Unused credits are one of the most common sources of invisible waste in corporate travel. A proactive TMC tracks these and surfaces them before they expire. If you're finding out about expired credits after the fact, no one is watching your program.
If your finance team is going line by line through statements to piece together what travel actually cost last month, your TMC isn't providing real reporting — they're providing raw data and calling it a report.
When employees regularly bypass Concur or call the TMC and just book directly on Expedia instead, it's usually because using the approved system is too painful. That's a TMC configuration problem, not a traveler compliance problem.
The honest test
If your account manager left tomorrow and was replaced by someone new, how long would it take for that person to understand your program? If the answer is "weeks" or "I don't know," your program lives in someone's head rather than in a properly managed account. That's a risk.
Not every company is at the same risk of being underserved. The companies most likely to be getting inadequate service from their TMC share a common profile: they're mid-size, with somewhere between $200K and $2M in annual travel spend. Large enough to need real management, but not large enough to be a priority account at an enterprise TMC.
At providers like Navan, BCD Travel, and Egencia, the economics work best on accounts spending $5M or more annually. Below that threshold, you're typically routed to a shared service model — a pool of agents handling many accounts, no named contact, limited customization. The platform technology may be excellent, but the human layer is effectively absent.
This isn't a criticism of those platforms — it's just how the economics of enterprise software work. But if your company is in that $100K–$2M range and you feel like an afterthought, that feeling is accurate.
Ask for the name of the person who will own your account. Ask what happens to your account if that person is on vacation or leaves the company. A good TMC has a clear answer. A call center model doesn't, because there's no individual who owns the relationship.
Ask what their SLA is for email response during business hours, and what the after-hours support model looks like. "We have a 24/7 line" means nothing if it routes to a voicemail. Ask for actual average response time data. A boutique TMC should be able to give you a specific number — ours is 23 minutes for email, 3 rings for calls.
If you're using or considering Concur, find out whether the TMC has experience configuring it from scratch, reconfiguring broken implementations, and training teams. Not all TMCs have deep Concur implementation expertise — some just facilitate bookings through it without understanding the platform's full capabilities.
If your company has Spanish-speaking travelers or operates across the US and Latin America, bilingual agent support is not optional — it's a basic service requirement. Ask whether their agents are bilingual, and whether calls and emails are handled in both languages by the same team or routed to a separate team.
Any TMC worth switching to should be able to walk you through their onboarding process step by step — including a pilot period where a small group of travelers tests the system before full rollout. If they don't do a pilot, that's a red flag: it means they're not accounting for the configuration adjustments that inevitably come up in real use.
The biggest hesitation most companies have about switching is the transition itself. The fear is: we'll disrupt our travelers, lose our Concur setup, and spend three months in implementation hell. In reality, if managed properly, a TMC transition is far less disruptive than most companies expect.
Here's what the process typically looks like:
Typically within 48 hours.
Define or refine your policy, approval workflows, and spending limits.
If you already have it, the technical transfer to us takes a single day — profiles and policies intact. If not, we build it from scratch as part of onboarding.
Your travelers' preferences and history come with them.
Catch workflow issues before full rollout.
Cutover scheduled on a low-travel day, typically a Friday.
Same platform, better service.
On Concur continuity
The technical transfer of your Concur instance to a new TMC takes a single day — nothing is rebuilt. Your new TMC works on the new configuration while the old one remains active. The cutover involves roughly half a day of downtime. Traveler profiles, preferences, and booking history are transferred directly — nothing is lost.
The full process takes most companies 3 to 4 weeks from contract signing to go-live. Companies that already have Concur configured often get there in 1 to 2 weeks.
| Enterprise TMC |
Boutique TMC (Telios)
Best fit
|
|
|---|---|---|
| Account management | Shared queue or rotating agents | One dedicated account manager — your single point of contact, direct line, always available |
| Email response time | 4–8 hours typical | 23 minutes average |
| After-hours support | Available, often via third-party call center | Five named in-house agents — real travel agents, never a call center — 24/7/365 |
| Bilingual support | Varies — may be routed externally | In-house English & Spanish, same team |
| Best fit for | $5M+ annual travel spend | $100K–$2M annual travel spend |
| Concur expertise | Strong platform integration | Full implementation, repair & optimization |
| Unused ticket tracking | Available, often client-managed | Proactively tracked and applied by account team |
| Vendor negotiations | Volume-dependent — small accounts get limited leverage | Proactively negotiated from day one — we go out and get the rates, you don't have to ask |
Common questions
Most transitions take 3 to 4 weeks from contract signing to full go-live. Companies that already have SAP Concur configured often complete the switch in 1 to 2 weeks, since the platform infrastructure is already in place. The most time-consuming part is usually the travel policy review — defining spending limits, approval workflows, and preferred vendor rules. Once policy is locked in, the technical configuration is fast.
If managed properly, disruption is minimal. Your new TMC builds the new configuration while your old one stays active. Cutover is scheduled on a low-travel day — typically a Friday — so travelers log in Monday morning and the new system works. A pilot period with a small group before full rollout catches most workflow issues before they affect everyone.
No. Switching the TMC behind your Concur instance means we transfer your existing instance — nothing is rebuilt. Traveler profiles, travel policies, and historical data transfer directly to us. Your new TMC reconfigures the back end — updating the booking channel and any TMC-specific settings — while keeping your existing setup intact wherever possible.
Unused airline credits belong to the traveler or the company — not the TMC — so they travel with you when you switch. Your new TMC should conduct a full audit of outstanding credits at the start of the relationship and build a tracking system to ensure they're applied before expiration. This is one of the first things Telios does for new clients.
The most useful thing to bring is your annual travel spend — or your best estimate broken down by category (air, hotel, car rental). This lets the TMC show you projected savings, quote pricing accurately, and identify where the biggest opportunities are. If you don't have clean data yet, a rough annual figure is enough to start the conversation.
If more than two or three of the warning signs above describe your current situation, it's worth at least having a conversation with an alternative provider. The cost of staying — in wasted credits, lost compliance, and hours your team spends managing travel manually — compounds every month.
The evaluation process doesn't have to be formal. A good TMC should be able to look at your current travel spend, show you where the savings opportunities are, and walk you through what their onboarding process looks like — all before you sign anything.
Written by
Director of Account Management & Sales
Your first call and your ongoing partner. Natasha leads account management and sales at Telios — the primary point of contact for every client relationship, making sure each program runs the way it should.
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ReadFree, no pressure
Tell us about your travel program and we'll show you how Telios would run it.
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Natasha Sasson