British Airways has today launched a revolutionary new on-line business travel management portal, Your Travel Manager, which will deliver significant savings to small businesses by implementing more effective travel policies.

The easy to use system gives small to medium sized companies (SME) access to a one-stop shop for booking hotels, car-hire and airline travel and enables the company to access competitive fares and save on administrative costs. It also represents an opportunity for companies to manage their travel budget as a single entity.

The portal, developed in conjunction with technology partner, GetThere.com, can be personalised to reflect individual corporate travel policies and, in order to speed up subsequent bookings, it is possible to specify travellers’ preferences.

British Airways is offering the technology to travel agents for their small to medium sized corporate clients and companies who wish to make direct bookings.

Agents will be able to set it up as their own business travel management system enabling them to tailor it, co-brand it, or link it to their own website.

The airline is expected to generate significant new business by moving further in to this lucrative, multi-billion pound SME business travel market.

Simon Parks-Smith, who leads the airline’s Business-to-Business eCommerce division said: “This technology represents a great opportunity for companies to have access to low budget travel management services, without having to invest in the excessive costs of new systems. In short, we’re offering small businesses a virtual travel manager.

“It also shows our continued commitment to working with the travel trade to ensure we jointly maximise the benefits of on-line booking. We believe we are the only airline to adopt such a partnership based approach to the travel trade when launching on-line booking facilities.”

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