OTA (Online Travel Agency)

An online agency that sells flights and hotels to end users, typically in the consumer segment. Unlike a corporate travel booking platform, an OTA generally has no built-in policy controls, approval workflows or reporting suited to business travel. Employees who book through an OTA usually fall outside the company's managed travel programme.

Well-known OTAs work well for leisure travel: they offer wide choice, familiar interfaces and frequent promotions. For companies, however, they create several problems. Each employee pays with a personal or corporate card, receipts and invoices have to be collected manually, VAT documents may be incomplete, and there is no way to check bookings against the travel policy before they are made. Support is designed for individual consumers rather than for business travellers who need urgent changes.

Employees often turn to OTAs because they believe consumer sites offer lower prices or more choice. As a result, part of the company's travel spend ends up outside the managed programme — a problem travel managers call leakage. Closing this gap usually requires a corporate tool that matches consumer sites on price and convenience while adding the controls a business needs. Leakage also weakens the company's position in supplier negotiations.

This is the gap Tumodo is designed to close. The platform offers a consumer-style booking experience with prices that match airline and hotel websites, but adds what an OTA lacks: a built-in travel policy, approval workflows, automatically generated closing documents, spend analytics, 24/7 support for business travellers and flexible payment options, including postpayment for the company. Tumodo also helps companies reclaim VAT on eligible travel expenses.