Travel agent - global coverage

[diningdecadence]

Hi all,

hoping to find some pearls of wisdom here. hopefully this is set out neatly enough to be straight-forward!

setting the scene:
we're a small business of about 50 people with offices on most continents. HQ is in Sydney. travel is both international office visits, as well as client visits intra-continent.

quandry:
we want to centralise travel bookings, but take advantage of local city ticketing. at present, we are using an Australian based agent who tickets based on the tickets being issued in AUS, and in AUD. However this often results in us paying 'over the odds' for these overseas intra-continent flights... e.g. SIN-ICN, or IAD-YYZ. (I'm not concerned about being charged in the home foreign currency, as the savings outweigh the fees exponentially)

questions:
- does anyone else try to manage a situation like this?
- are there any recommendations for agents to take care of this? (we're happy to pay a booking fee for someone else to do this)
- any suggestions for alternative options if there's not a "one-stop shop" (e.g. have 4 separate TA's in each continent?)

thanks in advance, sorry for the length of the post.

 

[ftm]

If you are able to get the current TA to realise what's going on and how to get around it, that could be the easiest solution.

SQ is one of the worst for penalising Australian point of sale for tickets originating in another country. They basically block all lower fare classes and force you to pay full Y. But its just a case of knowing when a fare doesn't feel right and booking those tickets online via the airline website, changing the country to the one of departure. You then get the cheaper fare.

We do that for a couple of clients who have similar itineraries to you.

If you can get your TA to do the same, then you'll be able to keep everything with the one company and get the better fares.

 

[MEL_Traveller]

But its just a case of knowing when a fare doesn't feel right and booking those tickets online via the airline website, changing the country to the one of departure. You then get the cheaper fare.

even using googleflights takes two or three seconds and returns local market results for the cheapest fares, and the range of applicable departure times.

 

[dajop]

One comment be aware of travel agents with global coverage - often they act as individual travel agents anyway, so you have to contact the specific agency in the country of origin to get fares from that country unless you specifically request the local agency to do it that way. I know this was the case with CWT, large corporate TA (not sure if still the case). I often used to organize domestic flights in some countries through our local offices, rather than from our local CWT - although the situation was improving over time (since changed jobs so don't know what it is like now).

If flights are simple point to point, and the volume of flights originating outside Australia is not too large, it may be easiest to deal with airline websites/airlines or online agents such as Expedia.