Company travel is a budget problem wearing a destination, and the sequence below is the one this desk uses for offsites, incentive weeks and roadshows between twelve and two hundred people. Numbers come before adjectives on purpose, because the number is what gets approved. What follows is the order the work happens in, from the first headcount to the invoice.
What the desk takes on
Flights against arrival banks, room blocks and rooming lists, meeting-room holds, ground transport, and the paperwork finance asks for afterwards. Every booking gets one owner and one deadline, and the list circulates so nobody assumes somebody else handled it. You keep the approvals and the final guest list, since those are yours rather than mine.
How a group day is priced
Per head, per day, with the cap agreed in writing before a single venue proposal arrives, because proposals expand to fill whatever budget they are shown. A realistic day in a European city reads about 90 to 140 a head for rooms, meals and a meeting space, before flights are added. Contingency sits as its own visible line at roughly eight per cent, so whoever signs can tell commitment from buffer.
What I need before a quote
A named list with roles rather than a number, since that list changes twice and each change reopens the rooming list. Alongside it: departure airports, the dates that cannot move, and the per-head figure finance has already approved.
- Named travellers with roles, and a second list of people who may attend.
- Airports, with anyone flying separately flagged rather than assumed.
- The per-head daily cap, and who approves a change above it.
Where these trips usually break
Rooms first, then transport, then the meeting room that was held without a name against it, and the failure is nearly always a timing one rather than a money one. A group split across two airports doubles the transfer bill and the risk of somebody standing alone with a bag. The three that come up most often look like this:
- The rooming list sent on arrival day instead of seventy-two hours ahead.
- Two arrival banks three hours apart, which quietly costs the whole first afternoon.
- Twelve voices in the approval chain, producing twelve versions of the same trip.
While the group is moving
One number reaches a person who already holds the itinerary, so a change does not have to be explained from the beginning. Updates go back into the same thread, which stops the next traveller being briefed from an older version of the plan. Outside office hours the duty phone covers delays, because a road closure at eight in the evening is exactly when a company decides whether it will call this desk again.
Send headcount, dates and the cap, and the first reply comes back either with a shaped plan or with the short list of details still missing before one can be built. Nothing else is needed to begin, and the fee schedule arrives before any card details are requested.