Streamlining travel cost gets easier with Central Travel Account

UNIGLOBE Travel has recently introduced Central Travel Account (CTA), a centralized booking solution from HDFC Bank, for its clients. CTA allows you to consolidate travel expenses and in turn achieve cost efficiency by ensuring better control over travel spend, transparency through improved spend visibility and policy compliance. Read on as our UNIGLOBE experts give you a lowdown on all there is to know about CTA.

What is Central Travel Account or CTA?

CTA is a Company Card Account with HDFC Bank, lodged with your UNIGLOBE Travel expert that they can directly use for all your authorized travel requisitions related to air travel, lodging, visa and passport. You can also use CTA to book through the UNIGLOBE Travel self booking tool – Complete Access Online.

Booking Travel through CTA vs. Standard Booking & Invoicing

Let’s take the example of booking your air tickets through the standard booking and invoicing process. What do you do? First, you place your booking request with your Travel Management Company (TMC). The TMC, in turn, raises the invoice for the booking. Then, you make the payment to the TMC on a weekly or a fortnightly basis. Finally, the TMC makes the payment to the airlines as per IATA’s Billing and Settlement Plan (BSP) schedule. Overall, an elaborate process, isn’t it?

Now let’s take the case of booking your air ticket through CTA which is simpler and relatively straight forward. When using a CTA, you place your air travel booking request with your UNIGLOBE expert, who directly books the ticket using the CTA. You later settle the total payment for the CTA (the air ticket charges are a part of the total amount due along with the other bookings during the billing cycle) with HDFC bank as per the billing cycle rather than dealing with the payment for multiple invoices raised by your TMC.

Benefits of Using CTA

1. Better Control on Travel Expenditure & Transparency Lodging a CTA with your UNIGLOBE expert ensures preferred supplier and travel policy compliance and reduces exposure to unauthorised spends. It allows for centralised approval and payment and overall transparency in all travel transactions and charges.

    

2. Maximise Savings
   Besides the hassle of dealing with multiple invoices, using a CTA also results in reduced costs per trip as a result of lower credit costs with an extended payment term of up to 50 days.

    

3. Automation
   CTA eliminates the need to process multiple invoices and multiple employee reimbursements and cash advances. It also enables easy reconciliation and payment and the ability to integrate with corporate ERP System.

    

4. Visibility to Travel Expenses
   ​Last but not the least, the consolidated report of multiple travel transactions into one comprehensive report provides better visibility of travel expenses. You can also opt for online expense reporting with customized reports. 

Ready to explore CTA? Get in touch with your UNIGLOBE expert, now!