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Making the Most of your unused tickets How our proprietary Banx technology can impact your bottom line

Things happen. Business meetings get cancelled. Family events come up. Unfortunately, in today’s fast paced business environment, unused, nonrefundable tickets can sometimes be easily forgotten. When considering changing travel plans, it’s important to keep this loss to a minimum to reduce high expenses.

Spoilage, that dirty word, occurs when a nonrefundable airline ticket is cancelled and the resulting ticket credit reaches its expiration without being used. Properly managing these unused tickets before they expire is not only sensible business sense, but helps reduce costs.

Our Banx tool automatic notifies travel managers of nonrefundable tickets before they expire. Check-in alerts allow Travel and Transport's travel advisors to cancel trips when a traveler hasn’t checked in for the flight. This allows the client’s corporate hierarchy to make name changes for unused tickets, essentially eliminating the potential for the ticket to go unused.

How does this compare to other TMCs?

Spoilage rates are the percentage of nonrefundable tickets that expire without being used. While other TMCs boast a 10% spoilage rate, Banx has resulted in Travel and Transport achieving a significantly lower rate than the industry average, and this rate continues to decrease over the years. In 2016 Travel and Transport achieved a 7.79% rate, followed by a 5.38% rate in 2017, and a 5.02% spoilage rate in 2018.

That’s impressive. How is it accomplished? Well, tickets are available for name changes at 60 days. Our travel advisors are notified of this in our traveler relationship management tool Leap Advisor, and choose to accept or decline the usage. If a ticket is unable to be used 24 hours prior to its expiration, we refund the taxes of the ticket, something no other TMC offers. This resulted in savings of $325,041.05 for Travel and Transport customers in 2018.

It may be difficult to understand the impact a small reduction in the spoilage rate has on company savings. Travel and Transport’s 5.02% rate compared to the promoted 10% of many other TMCs introduces a $49,800 difference per million in air spend.

There are many benefits to reducing, and hopefully eliminating, ticket spoilage.