Business Travel Agents and Ground Transport: How It Works

Business travel agents (and the larger travel management companies, or TMCs) book flights, hotels and rail for companies, inside a travel policy that controls cost and keeps a record of who is where. Ground transport is the piece they handle least consistently: some book it through partner networks, some hand it to an executive assistant, and many leave the traveller to find a car on arrival.

That gap is easy to miss from the inside. The chain that books a flight from Amsterdam to Singapore flawlessly often goes quiet at the arrivals hall, and nobody notices until a director is standing at a taxi rank at 23:00 with a card that will need an expense claim. This guide maps how the chain works, where the road segments fall through it, and what agents look for when they bring a chauffeur partner into a programme. We write it as the operator at the end of that chain: SilverDrive takes bookings from agents, TMCs, assistants and companies directly.

What Business Travel Agents Do

A business travel agent arranges travel for employees on behalf of a company, under that company’s rules. The agent books the trip, applies the travel policy (cabin class, hotel caps, approval steps), holds negotiated rates, reports on spend and supports travellers when a journey goes wrong.

The core inventory is well defined: flights first, hotels second, rail increasingly, and car rental where travellers drive themselves. These categories are standardised and distributed through global booking systems, so an agent can search, compare and book them inside policy in a few minutes. That is the job most companies are paying for.

TMC, Corporate Travel Agent or B2B Travel Agency?

The three terms overlap, and the difference is mostly scale and tooling.

Term	What it usually means	Typical client
Travel management company (TMC)	Runs the whole travel programme: online booking tool, policy enforcement, reporting, 24/7 traveller support	Mid-size and large companies
Corporate travel agent	Similar work with more personal, manual service and lighter software	Smaller accounts, executive travel
B2B travel agency	A broad label for any agency selling to businesses, sometimes to other travel agents rather than to companies	Varies widely

All three sit between the company and its suppliers, in the world of contracts, invoices and service levels rather than consumer apps. The Global Business Travel Association is the main industry body for travel managers and the agencies that serve them, and it is a good place to start if you are setting up a programme from scratch.

How Business Travel Agents Charge

There is no single fee. Agents and TMCs charge in some mix of three ways: a fee per booking (transaction fee), a management fee for running the programme, and commission paid by suppliers. The model matters for ground transport. If every booking carries a fee, a short airport transfer can cost more to process than it seems worth, and the agent may quietly leave it to the traveller. Ask for the fee schedule in writing and check whether a car counts as a booking.

Why Ground Transport Is the Weak Link

Ground transport is the odd one out because there is no single global inventory of chauffeur services the way there is for airline seats. Supply is local and fragmented: thousands of operators, each covering a city or a region, with different standards and no common booking system.

Three things follow from that:

Coverage varies by city. An agent may have a trusted partner in Amsterdam and nobody in Lyon or Antwerp.
Changes happen late. A flight lands 90 minutes late, a meeting overruns, a dinner moves. The road segment absorbs every one of those changes, often outside office hours.
Information has to cross handovers. Flight numbers, luggage, the name on the board and the schedule all have to reach the person driving. Each handover is a place where they can fail to arrive.

So TMCs handle ground transport in one of three ways: through an integrated partner network, through local operators they know and trust, or not at all.

Who Books the Car: Four Common Patterns

In practice, responsibility for the road lands in one of four places.

Who arranges the ground transport	How it typically happens	Weak point
The TMC or agent	Booked alongside the flight via partners	Coverage varies by city
The executive assistant	Books a known chauffeur operator directly	Depends on the assistant’s supplier list
The traveller	Taxi rank or ride-hail on arrival	No record, no fixed cost, no vetting
The host or meeting organiser	Arranges a car for the visitor	Fine, until schedules change

The most common real pattern combines the second and third rows. The agent books the flight and the hotel, the executive assistant books the car to Schiphol, and the traveller improvises at the other end. That is why the executive assistant is such a central figure in corporate ground transport, whatever the org chart says. Our guide to choosing and running a corporate car service covers that side of the job in more depth.

What Agents Look for in a Chauffeur Partner

When a business travel agent or TMC does take ground transport into scope, they almost never send clients to a taxi rank. They keep a short list of vetted chauffeur operators per city, and the reasons are structural rather than snobbish.

Accountability for the Journey

The agent’s name is attached to the trip. A vetted partner is a named company with a service standard, a contact who answers and a reputation to lose. A ride-hail driver allocated by an algorithm 90 seconds before pickup is none of those things.

Our view is that ownership of the fleet is where accountability starts. The operator who owns the car answers for its condition and for the chauffeur in it. A marketplace reselling other people’s cars passes that responsibility down a chain, and the agent cannot see who is at the end of it.

A Price Agreed Before the Car Moves

Corporate travel runs on numbers known in advance. A fixed price agreed at booking can be quoted to the client, approved, billed and reconciled. A metered or surge-priced fare cannot. We think a price should be settled before the car moves; meter anxiety and surge multipliers are exactly what an agent is paid to keep away from a traveller.

Be precise with clients about what a fixed price covers. At SilverDrive the quote is fixed at booking, but parking, tolls, ferry and tunnel costs are not included, and nor are the chauffeur’s meals and hotel on an overnight trip (see our booking terms and pricing conditions). An agent who knows that up front never has to explain a surprise on the invoice.

Built for Airport Arrivals

Corporate journeys have properties consumer transport handles badly. The ones agents ask about most:

Flight tracking. The chauffeur follows the aircraft, not the timetable, so a delayed arrival is absorbed without anyone rebooking. On SilverDrive airport transfers, 60 minutes of waiting from the booked pickup time is included, and a late landing moves the pickup without changing the price.
Meet and greet inside the terminal for a first-time visitor, with or without a name board.
The same chauffeur retained across a multi-day programme, so the traveller deals with one person.
Vehicles that scale from a single saloon to a full delegation, with one supplier and one booking thread.

Consistency Across a Programme

An agent placing a client’s executives in three cities a month needs the service to feel the same each time. That comes from a supplier relationship, not from one-off bookings with whoever is free. It is also what clients notice. As a Trustpilot reviewer put it in January 2025: “We and our customer were impressed by their punctuality and their great service.” That sentence describes the agent’s position exactly: the booker and the booker’s client, both judging the same journey.

Billing, Expenses and Duty of Care

Two further reasons the road segment belongs inside the managed chain rather than on the traveller’s personal card.

Billing. Kerbside payments become expense claims: receipts photographed, currencies converted, finance teams reconciling line by line. Booked ground transport becomes an invoice against a cost centre: one supplier and one agreed figure per journey. For roadshows with several vehicles running in parallel, that is the difference between one clean invoice and a stack of paper.

Duty of care. Companies accept responsibility for employees while they travel, and the road segments are the least visible part of any trip. A flight is tracked by half a dozen systems; a taxi hailed at midnight is tracked by nobody. A known operator lets the company answer the basic questions (who is driving our people, in what vehicle, and who do we call at 02:00) with facts rather than hope.

Questions to Ask Your TMC About Ground Transport

If you manage a travel programme or book through an agency, these questions show quickly whether the road is covered or assumed:

Is ground transport in scope, and in which cities?
Who are your chauffeur partners there, and do they own their vehicles?
Is the price fixed at booking, and what is excluded from it?
Is flight tracking standard on airport pickups, and how much waiting is included?
Does the transfer appear on the traveller’s itinerary and in your reporting?
Who does the traveller call at night if the plan changes?
Is it invoiced to the company, or paid by the traveller and claimed back?

If the answer to the first question is “not really”, the executive assistant is your ground transport department, and it is worth giving them a supplier they can rely on.

How SilverDrive Works With Travel Agents and TMCs

SilverDrive works at whichever link of the chain the booking comes from: business travel agents and TMCs arranging journeys for their clients, executive assistants booking for their principals, and companies dealing with us directly. The offer is the same for all of them.

Our own fleet, confirmed in writing at booking, from the Mercedes E-Class saloon through the S-Class, EQS, BMW i7, V-Class and Sprinter to a 52-seat Setra coach.
Licensed, background-checked, English-speaking chauffeurs, who do not discuss payment with passengers. The same chauffeur can be requested for repeat routes.
Fixed prices agreed at booking, with no surge multipliers, billed on one consolidated invoice with your cost centres or references.
Flight tracking on every airport pickup and 24/7 availability across the Netherlands and Europe; for longer programmes, our private drivers across Europe work on the same fixed-price basis.

Our corporate transportation page sets out how accounts run. On Trustpilot, SilverDrive holds a TrustScore of 4.7 (“Excellent”) from 34 reviews (checked November 2026).

Frequently Asked Questions

What does a business travel agent actually book?

Flights and hotels above all, usually rail as well, all held inside the company’s travel policy and reporting. Ground transport is the least standardised piece: some TMCs book it through partner networks, some pass it to the traveller or an executive assistant, and some leave it out of scope entirely. Ask yours which of the three applies.

What is the difference between a TMC and a corporate travel agent?

Mostly scale and tooling. A travel management company (TMC) runs a company’s whole travel programme: booking platform, policy enforcement, reporting and traveller support. A corporate travel agent usually serves smaller accounts with a more personal, manual service. Both sit between the company and its suppliers, and both can arrange ground transport if it is in their scope.

What is a normal fee for a business travel agent?

There is no single normal fee, because the charging model varies. Common models are a fee per booking, a monthly or annual management fee, or commission paid by suppliers, and many agents combine them. Ask for the fee schedule in writing, including whether a car or airport transfer counts as a separate booking.

Do business travel agents book airport transfers and chauffeurs?

Some do, many do not, and the answer often changes by city. An agent with a vetted chauffeur partner in Amsterdam may have nobody in Lyon. Where the agent does not cover the road, the executive assistant or the traveller books it, which is why the transfer is the segment most often missing from the itinerary.

Why do travel agents use vetted chauffeur partners instead of taxis?

Because the agent’s name is attached to the journey. A vetted partner offers confirmed bookings, a fixed price that can be invoiced, flight tracking, professional chauffeurs and a named company to hold accountable. A taxi rank or ride-hail app cannot promise any of that in advance. It is an accountability decision more than a comfort one.

Can a chauffeur company invoice the company instead of the traveller?

Yes, and for corporate work it should. SilverDrive fixes the price at booking and bills companies on one consolidated invoice with their cost centres or references, so travellers do not pay at the kerb and claim the money back through expenses. Parking, tolls, ferry and tunnel costs are not part of the quote.

How does ground transport fit into duty of care?

Duty of care covers the whole journey, and the road segments are the part most often left untracked. Booking through a known operator gives the company a record of who is driving, in which vehicle, on which route, and a 24/7 point of contact if plans change. A taxi hailed at midnight leaves no such record.

Close the Gap in Your Travel Chain

Business travel agents get the flights and hotels right; the road deserves the same rigour. Wherever you sit in the chain (agent, TMC, assistant or the company itself), send us a route, a programme or a recurring requirement and we will come back with fixed prices and a clear way of working. Get in touch to talk about working together.