Find travel agent to service Your duty trips in Poland

How to find a travel agent to service Your duty trips in Poland? Are self-booking tools on the market? What is a fair price for such a service?

We have more and more foreigners coming to Poland and establishing their own business here. If You have a company established You will most probably travel on duties too. For foreigners, it might be difficult to find a trustworthy travel agent to serve his company in an unknown market. Below some tips on whom to trust and what solution might be the best for foreign small and medium companies established in Poland.

Key services characteristics You would need

We can assume that as a foreigner You would need an English speaking contact, serving Your business trips. This unfortunately is not a standard in Poland yet. Still, we can find some agents which will meet these criteria. You need also to double-check if the English-speaking personnel is available all the time. Might be a case that You will have only one English speaking travel agent in the agency You do consider cooperating.

All depends of course on Your travel budget. If your annual spendings are around 25 000 Euros ( counting all services) You can try to contact big players like E-Travels or Weco Travel.  I would rather try to look for some smaller ones with more personalized services. You can try to contact SkyforYou, BB events, Royal Club or Bastian Travel all are compact and offering highly personalized service.

Apart of the availability of English-speaking personnel, You would need also 24 hours service, this could be also challenging in Poland. Real 24 h service could be offered by companies servicing different countries in Poland. An example of these kinds of companies is Hotailors and eSky.pl.

What about the automated solution to service Your duty trips

Now automated self-booking tools are more and more popular in Poland. Already mentioned Hotailors is dynamic start up entering the market with AI solutions to make Your travel more smooth. Another potential solution are the platforms offered by eSky and e-Travel. Both should be also capable to support You with offline help desks.

Automated solutions do have a lot of advantages. They are transparent, easy to use, allowing you to monitor Your employees while traveling.  They are largely self-driven too. In the case of Hotailors, You have also the possibility to pay for duty trips of Your partners. Cooperating with You on B2B contracts/projects so not necessarily being Your employees. ( by law).

What  also to have in mind – pay special attention to transparency

As already mentioned unfortunately Polish market is not that automated. Still a lot of manual work in the travel agents world. This is also giving a field to some grey areas – especially while booking hotels. Agents in Poland are very often adding a huge mark up to base fare. Sometimes increasing base offers by 10-15-30 %. You have to be sure that this is not Your case. To avoid this kind of situation You may opt for the already mentioned automated solutions. Another way is to count on personal relations with Your travel agents.

Be also sure that You are registered to all corporate programs dedicated for small and medium companies in Poland. The most important ones are LOT dla Firm, BlueBiz by KLM/AF and Partner Plus Benefit by Lufthansa group. You can save around 3% of Your spendings and feel a bit more safer in case of irregularities. The better saving rate can be also achieved by using Your points on upgrading to a higher class. Premium Economy on long haul routes seems to be the best choice. Last week also Qatar Airways has joined the competition offering interesting proposal. Beyond Business is based on same principals but seems to take all the best from competitor programs.

Duty Travel market in Poland is very competitive „on paper”?

Its worth understanding that the polish market is highly competitive and ticketing/service fees tend to be very low „on paper”. So it would not be difficult to find agents offering 20-30 PLN for ticketing service. If You see too low an offer You should be more than conscious. There is high probability that these agent will use other ways to make a profit on You. Its better to pay honestly and not to be exposed on manipulations.  Fair ticketing service price should be not lower than 40 pln in case of Europen flights. This amount is still low comparing to European Union markets. Having in mind that average air ticket to Europe costs is around 1200-1500 pln service fee cost is not exceeding 3-4%, Which seems to be fair ratio.

Need additional services – Luxury Travel, Women-Only or trekking or kite /water sports

In case of need of additional/holiday services pls pay attention to articles published about Luxury Travel Markets in Poland plus Women-only tourism. Worth mentioning that among agents servicing duty trips You can find some specialized in niches like Trekking / in case of Aurinko or Watersports /kite in case of Impuls f. If You are a fan of activities like this. You can combine duty trips with holiday ones and get added value too.