It's the 28th of the month. Supplier statements have just arrived, three corporate clients want their spend reports by Monday, and a stack of refunds is still waiting to be matched against what the airlines actually paid back. The two people who understand all of this are also the two people your biggest client calls first.
That week, repeated every month, is usually what starts the outsourcing conversation in a travel business. Once it starts, the useful question is a narrow one: which piece of work goes first?
Pick well and the first process becomes the pattern for everything after it. Pick badly and you spend three months fixing a handover instead of growing the business.
The pressure is real, and it is growing
GBTA expects business travel spending to reach a record $1.71 trillion in 2026, while the number of trips grows far more slowly. Most of that gap comes from higher fares and travel costs. Put simply, every booking now carries more money, and every billing mistake costs more to fix.
The admin behind each trip has not become any lighter. An agency settling through the IATA Billing and Settlement Plan has to account for every sale, refund and adjustment before each remittance date. Hotels have their own version of the same pile: payables, commissions and the reports owners expect on time. None of it is glamorous, and all of it has to be right.
Start with the work that is ready
The instinct is to hand over whatever hurts most. Resist it. The most painful process is often painful because nobody has ever written down how it works.
Before a process goes anywhere, ask four plain questions about it:
1. Is it regular? Does it arrive often and follow roughly the same path each time?
2. Is it written down? Could you explain what a correct result looks like, including the usual exceptions?
3. Is it catchable? If something goes wrong, will you spot it before it reaches a client or a payment run?
4. Is it measurable? At the end of the week, can you tell whether it was done well?
Four yeses make a good first candidate. Two or more noes mean the process should wait until someone on your side has documented it properly. Our guide to writing an SOP someone can actually work from helps with that step.
Good first candidates in a travel business
Every company is different, so treat these as examples rather than a menu.
Accounts work is usually the easiest place to begin. Supplier invoice matching, payables preparation, refund tracking, collections follow-up and reconciliation all run on rules and arrive in steady volume. When a booking, a supplier statement and a payment refuse to agree, you want someone who will investigate patiently and leave a clear note of what they found. Our piece on building a better exception queue shows how to keep those mismatches visible instead of buried in a spreadsheet.
Records and data come next. Client profiles, supplier details, rates and contract terms all feed into invoices and reports later, so a small error here travels a long way. Clear field rules matter more than speed.
Then there is reporting. Corporate clients expect monthly spend reports, and hotel owners expect their performance packs on time. Once the definitions are agreed, a trained team can build these reliably every cycle. Your account manager still owns the conversation about what the numbers mean.
Sales and marketing support is the one people forget. Prospect research, CRM clean-up, proposals from approved templates and follow-up tracking quietly eat hours your sales team should be spending with buyers.
Hotels feel this too. In an Inn-Flow survey of hotel finance and operations professionals, respondents saw the biggest opportunity in cutting repetitive manual work such as bill handling and transaction checks.
What your own team should keep
Some work should stay close to the people who carry the relationship and the risk. Pricing and supplier negotiations. The difficult call with a key account. Any decision that sets a precedent, like waiving a fee for a large client. And the final click that releases money from your bank account.
A good partner can prepare all of this, check it and flag anything that looks odd. The decision stays with you. Drawing that line early makes the whole handover calmer, because nobody has to guess who decides.
Access, money and a paper trail
Travel data includes passenger details, payment information and commercial terms, so be strict from the first day. Give the delivery team access only to what the process needs. Write down what never happens without your approval, such as changing a supplier's bank details. And make sure every completed item leaves a trace of what was done, by whom and when.
The same thinking applies to automation. Deloitte's Global Outsourcing Survey found that most executives already use AI inside their outsourced services, yet weak governance has held back the gains. Tools can make the work faster. A named person should still answer for the result.
Run one small pilot first
Choose one process for one region or one client, and hand it over properly: the documentation, a few examples of right and wrong outcomes, and who to ask when something does not fit. Our process handover checklist covers what the new team needs on day one.
Then run real work through it at a small volume for a few weeks. Look at the output, the questions that came back and how much of your own team's time it took. The 30-day pilot plan gives you a week-by-week structure to follow.
As an illustration, a travel company might start with supplier invoice matching for a single market. Once accuracy settles, refund tracking follows, and after that the monthly client reports. Each step builds on rules that are already working.
Know what working looks like
Agree a short scorecard before the first item moves. For most back-office work, five things tell you enough: how much was accepted without correction, how long it took, how many items are stuck waiting for information, how many hours your team spent reviewing, and whether anything reached a client or a payment that should not have.
Watch the trend rather than one bad day, and always ask why a number moved. Our guide to operations metrics that matter explains how to keep this light.
When you speak to a potential partner, ask how they will learn your process, what happens when an item does not fit the rules, who checks quality, and how you would scale back if you needed to. Specific answers are a good sign. Big promises about speed and savings, made before anyone has seen your work, are not.
Where to go from here
Done well, outsourcing gives your most experienced people their month-end back while you keep the decisions that matter. Start with one ready process, keep the money and the relationships in your own hands, measure honestly and grow from there.
Dhiti works with corporate travel and hotel businesses on back-office operations, accounts and finance, reporting and sales support, with more than 200 trained specialists. If your 28th of the month looks like the one above, we would be glad to talk.
Examples and suggested targets are illustrative, not Dhiti client results or contractual commitments. Adapt the approach to your process, risk and team.
