How to choose a corporate travel management company in Kenya: a procurement guide

Most travel management tenders in Kenya are decided on the wrong evidence. The submissions look similar, the fee schedules are compared line by line, and the award goes to whoever priced the transaction lowest. Twelve months later the programme costs more than the previous one, because the fee was never where the money was.

This guide sets out the framework we would want a client to hold us to. It is written for procurement, finance, administration, HR and executive offices who have to defend the appointment internally and live with it operationally.

Start by defining the programme, not the requirement

Before writing an RFP, describe how your organisation actually travels: annual trip volume, split between domestic, regional and intercontinental, top twenty routes, seasonality, how much travel is group or delegation work, how many travellers need visas, who approves, who pays, and what your audit or donor rules require of the paperwork. Providers cannot price accurately against a generic scope, and you cannot compare responses that were priced against different assumptions.

The evaluation framework

• Service levels: committed quote turnaround in business hours, after-hours acknowledgement time, named coordinator plus named cover, escalation path with authority to act
• Ticketing capability: whether tickets are issued on the provider's own accreditation with direct GDS access, or routed through a consolidator - this decides who can reissue at 22:00
• Financial controls: credit terms, deposit rules, invoice format, cost-centre, project and donor coding, refund crediting process, unused-ticket register
• Reporting: a live sample pack, not a template - spend by traveller and cost centre, exception coding, advance-purchase discipline, route concentration, refund recovery status
• Traveller support: in-trip change handling, disruption protocol, duty-of-care check-ins, medical and evacuation coordination
• Group and MICE capability: manifest control, rooming lists, batch visa staging, arrival waves, conference ground logistics
• Visa and documentation: handled in-house or referred onward, and who owns resubmissions
• Implementation: transition plan, data migration, traveller onboarding, first-90-day review cadence
• Account management: named person, review cadence, willingness to be benchmarked mid-contract

Weight the criteria before you read a single response

Agree the scoring weights in advance and record them. A programme dominated by executive and delegation travel should weight service levels, escalation and group capability heavily. A donor-funded programme should weight financial controls, coding and documentation. A high-volume domestic programme should weight ticketing throughput and reporting. If the weights are set after the responses arrive, the decision is no longer defensible.

Financial controls deserve more attention than fees

Ask how refunds are credited, how long a refund typically takes from claim to credit note, who tracks it, and what happens to a ticket that goes unused. Ask for the invoice template and check whether it carries your cost-centre and project codes without manual re-keying. Ask about credit terms honestly - a provider extending terms it cannot fund will show that strain later in service, not in the contract.

Credit considerations

Credit is a genuine differentiator for organisations that cannot prepay every ticket, but it should be scoped, not assumed. Establish the credit limit, the settlement period, what happens when a single group movement exceeds the limit, and whether deposits are required for group air or conference blocks. A clear, modest credit arrangement that is always honoured is worth more than a generous one that gets renegotiated under pressure.

RFP questions that actually separate providers

• Describe, step by step, what happens when a traveller's connecting flight is cancelled at 23:00 on a Sunday. Who answers, what authority do they have, and what does the traveller receive?
• Do you issue tickets on your own accreditation? If a reissue is needed outside office hours, who performs it?
• Show a real monthly reporting pack from a comparable account, anonymised.
• How do you track unused tickets, and what was recovered on a comparable account last year?
• How would you stage visas for a 30-person delegation across three nationalities, and what buffers do you build in?
• Who is our named coordinator, who covers them, and what is your internal handover process?
• What is your committed quote turnaround, and what remedy applies if it is missed?
• How would you transition our programme, and what would the first 90 days look like week by week?
• What would you need from us to reduce total programme cost, and how would you evidence the reduction?

Score the implementation plan, not just the promise

The riskiest window in any TMC appointment is the first eight weeks. Ask for a written transition plan covering traveller profile migration, approver setup, policy configuration, supplier handover, unused-ticket transfer from the outgoing provider and a defined review at day 30, 60 and 90. A provider that cannot describe the transition in detail has not done many.

Common procurement mistakes

Comparing transaction fees without modelling programme cost. Awarding on a pitch team you will never work with again after signature. Accepting service levels that are described but not contracted. Skipping reference calls with the operational contact - not just the commercial one. And running the tender without your own baseline data, which leaves you unable to prove afterwards whether anything improved.

How Tulla responds to a TMC RFP

We model your actual volumes, name the coordinator who will hold the account, contract the response standards rather than describe them, and set out the transition plan with dated checkpoints. If you already have a provider, we are comfortable being benchmarked against them on your own data - see our method for benchmarking a current TMC.

Send a recent itinerary set, your travel policy or a draft RFP and we will respond with a structured proposal, usually within one working hour during business hours.