Trident Energy acquires and revitalises mid-life oil and gas assets across Africa, Latin America, South East Asia and the Middle East. In partnership with Kosmos Energy, the company took over the Ceiba field and Okume complex in the Gulf of Guinea from Hess Corporation, increasing production by 24% within months of acquisition.
Moving people to assets like these is not ordinary corporate travel. Crews rotate to remote locations on schedules that shift at short notice, and a single disrupted leg can leave a rotation stranded and a shift uncovered.
The challenge
- Air spend represented 82% of travel expenditure, with limited supplier optimisation against it.
- Out-of-hours booking requests were slow to turn around — critical given how often operational plans changed at short notice.
- Hold periods on itineraries were not disclosed up front, so pricing changed unexpectedly at ticketing.
- Booking errors, including misspelled passenger names, disrupted travel at the airport.
- Hotel billing complications left travellers paying out of pocket and reclaiming later.
What we did
- Established two separate travel accounts so costs could be segmented cleanly across entities and projects.
- Implemented an intuitive booking platform with preferred suppliers integrated directly.
- Integrated automated pre-trip approvals alongside airline reassurance features.
- Deployed compliance robotics to track unused tickets and recover what was refundable.
- Established preferred hotel partnerships with Barclaycard Conferma payment processing, so crews no longer fronted the cost.
The results
- £126k in reward flights via Lufthansa PartnerPlus and Air France BlueBiz.
- 92% adoption of preferred hotels, at 18% below standard daily rates.
- 100% success rate on pre-arranged hotel bill-backs.
- £33.9k recovered in permitted refunds from tracked unused tickets.
- £19.1k saved through bundled transaction fee pricing.
- 412 employee and sub-contractor travel profiles built, with automated visa and passport expiry alerts.
