88% of large Spanish companies only work with one travel agency

Most of the large Spanish companies, 88% of those interviewed, work with only one travel agency, while 10% work with more than one. The remaining 2% contract directly with travel suppliers and do not resort to intermediation. These are the results of the study recently carried out by Informa's DBK Sector Observatory.

The conclusions are based on a survey of over 150 interviews with companies in Spain with a turnover of more than 100 million euros.

E71.3% contractedó in 2016 transport tickets, hotel and rent-a-car bookings exclusively through travel agencies. In addition, another23.3%used this form of booking in the majority of cases. Only 5% contracted this type of services directly with suppliers.

The degree of loyaltyof the companies with the first agency they work with is high: 62.5% of those consulted have had an agreement with the current agency for more than five years. 36.8% have been working with the same agency for more than ten years. It is worth noting that 92.7% of the companies have centralized the entire travel contracting process. In addition, 45% have a travel manager in their structure.

29.6% of the companies for which information is available made a travel expenditure for employees of more than 1 million euros in 2016. Within this group of companies, 12.8% spent more than EUR 5 million, and 4.8% more than EUR 10 million. On the other hand, 15.2% of companies expect to increase travel spending, while 80.8% will maintain it and the remaining 4% will reduce it.

Internet presents already a significant penetration as a form of travel contracting, so that 35% of the large companies surveyed declare to have used in 2016 for travel contracting, while 65% did not.

According to the destination of the trips, 34% of the companies interviewed allocated more than half of the budget to travel abroad, a share that rose to 63.2% when considering companies that allocated a budget of more than 30%.