TD Cowen is an investment bank and asset manager whose teams move between financial centres at short notice. When a deal is live, travel is not a convenience — a missed connection costs considerably more than the fare.
The account came to us after a long relationship with an incumbent agency. As the client put it: "We had been working with our incumbent agency for over 8 years, and implementing a new travel management solution always seemed a daunting task."
The challenge
- Slow offline turnaround. Booking requests placed outside the online tool took too long to come back — precisely when speed matters most.
- Negotiated rates sitting unused. The client had already negotiated hotel rates, but they were difficult to surface inside the booking flow, so travellers frequently booked around them.
- Uncompetitive air fares. British Airways carried 74% of air spend without a corporate agreement earning anything back against that volume.
- Misallocated invoices. Costs were landing against the wrong accounts, making reconciliation slow and reporting unreliable.
- Poorly maintained traveller profiles. Every booking started from scratch, adding time to each transaction and increasing the chance of error.
What we did
- Deployed a single sign-on platform combining self-booking, duty of care and data analytics in one place, removing the need to move between systems.
- Integrated the 58 existing hotel properties the client had already negotiated, and added three new locations to cover gaps in the programme.
- Enrolled the client in BA on Business, so the 74% of spend already going to British Airways began earning back.
- Rebuilt 122 traveller profiles in full, with approval routing attached to each one.
- Implemented the Lightning self-booking tool and ran comprehensive staff training, so adoption came from understanding rather than mandate.
- Established a daily handoff of reservations to International SOS, giving independent duty-of-care coverage on every trip.
The results
- £36.3k in flight savings in the first quarter, on London–New York routes alone.
- £46.1k in additional flagged savings across the wider programme.
- 156,000+ On Business reward points earned against spend that was happening anyway.
- Online adoption up from 77% to 82%.
- Average hotel cost down from £358 to £274 per night — a 23% reduction.
- 917 of 917 reservation files transferred successfully during migration, with nothing lost.
The client's summary afterwards: "Chapman & Carter's single sign-on technology suite is very simple and easy to utilise, and we have had very positive feedback from our key travel stakeholder groups."
