✈️ We're Hiring: Corporate Travel Manager
📍 Location: United Arab Emirates (Remote)
🕒 Employment Type: Full-Time
💼 Experience Level: Mid-Level to Senior
🌐 Work Arrangement: Fully Remote
About Us
We are a globally connected organization committed to providing efficient, cost-effective, safe, and seamless business-travel services for employees, executives, clients, and business partners.
Our distributed teams collaborate across Corporate Travel, HR, Finance, Procurement, Executive Administration, Security, Legal, Events, and Operations to manage business travel programs, optimize travel spending, support traveler safety, and maintain strong relationships with travel suppliers.
The Role
We are seeking an experienced Corporate Travel Manager to lead the organization's corporate travel program, including travel policy, supplier management, travel booking operations, cost optimization, traveler experience, travel risk management, reporting, and program governance.
The ideal candidate will combine strong travel-industry knowledge with commercial negotiation skills, financial discipline, excellent stakeholder management, and a strong understanding of corporate traveler needs.
Key Responsibilities
- Develop and manage the organization's global corporate travel strategy.
- Establish travel programs that balance employee experience, cost efficiency, safety, compliance, and business requirements.
- Develop, maintain, and enforce corporate travel policies and procedures.
- Ensure travel policies reflect organizational requirements, budget objectives, traveler needs, and applicable regulations.
- Establish clear rules for airfare, accommodation, ground transportation, rail, visas, travel insurance, business-class eligibility, upgrades, and other travel-related expenses.
- Monitor travel-policy compliance and identify opportunities for improvement.
- Manage relationships with travel-management companies (TMCs), airlines, hotels, car-rental providers, rail operators, travel platforms, and other travel suppliers.
- Negotiate corporate rates, discounts, preferred agreements, rebates, incentives, and other commercial terms.
- Conduct regular supplier reviews and assess supplier performance against agreed service levels.
- Evaluate supplier pricing, availability, service quality, flexibility, cancellation terms, and traveler satisfaction.
- Develop preferred-supplier programs and ensure employees are encouraged to use approved providers.
- Conduct regular market benchmarking to ensure negotiated travel rates remain competitive.
- Manage corporate travel-booking processes across air, hotel, ground transportation, and other business-travel services.
- Ensure travelers have access to efficient online booking tools and appropriate support channels.
- Coordinate complex itineraries, executive travel, group travel, and high-priority business trips where required.
- Support travel arrangements for senior executives, leadership teams, project teams, and employees traveling internationally.
- Coordinate group travel for conferences, events, business meetings, training programs, and corporate initiatives.
- Ensure travel arrangements align with company policies and approved budgets.
- Manage travel approvals and escalation processes.
- Develop appropriate approval workflows based on traveler level, destination, cost, trip purpose, and policy requirements.
- Monitor travel requests and ensure required approvals are obtained before bookings are finalized.
- Analyze corporate travel spending across airlines, hotels, destinations, departments, cost centers, projects, and employees.
- Develop travel-spend dashboards and management reports.
- Identify major cost drivers, savings opportunities, unusual spending patterns, and policy exceptions.
- Establish travel budgets and monitor actual expenditure against approved budgets.
- Work closely with Finance to ensure travel expenses are accurately captured, allocated, reconciled, and reported.
- Monitor travel-related invoices and resolve billing discrepancies with suppliers and travel-management companies.
- Identify opportunities to reduce travel costs without negatively affecting productivity or traveler safety.
- Optimize advance-purchase behavior, preferred suppliers, booking channels, negotiated rates, travel classes, hotel categories, and trip frequency.
- Analyze travel demand and identify opportunities for virtual alternatives where appropriate.
- Track and report realized and potential travel savings.
- Develop travel-spend forecasts and support annual budgeting processes.
- Manage corporate travel cards, lodge cards, virtual cards, and other approved travel-payment mechanisms where applicable.
- Establish appropriate controls over travel-related payments and expenses.
- Monitor travel expense compliance and coordinate with Finance on exceptions or irregularities.
- Implement traveler-profile management and ensure traveler information is accurate and up to date.
- Ensure appropriate handling of passport, visa, loyalty-program, contact, and other travel information in accordance with privacy requirements.
- Support visa and immigration coordination for business travelers where required.
- Maintain information regarding visa requirements, travel documentation, entry restrictions, and destination requirements.
- Coordinate with approved visa-service providers and relevant authorities when necessary.
- Monitor international travel restrictions, entry requirements, and significant destination-related developments.
- Establish and manage corporate travel-risk and traveler-safety programs.
- Develop procedures for managing travel disruptions, emergencies, natural disasters, geopolitical events, health incidents, security threats, and other travel risks.
- Maintain appropriate traveler-tracking and emergency-contact capabilities.
- Coordinate with Security, HR, Legal, and external travel-risk providers during travel emergencies.
- Establish emergency communication and traveler-support procedures.
- Provide timely support during flight cancellations, major delays, lost travel documents, security incidents, and other travel disruptions.
- Develop contingency arrangements and alternative travel options during major disruptions.
- Monitor traveler safety and duty-of-care requirements across international destinations.
- Maintain appropriate travel-insurance programs and coordinate claims where applicable.
- Evaluate travel-insurance coverage, emergency assistance, medical support, evacuation services, and other relevant benefits.
- Work with HR and Security to ensure travel programs support employee duty-of-care obligations.
- Monitor traveler satisfaction and collect feedback on booking, accommodation, transportation, support, and overall travel experiences.
- Develop traveler-experience improvement initiatives.
- Identify recurring service issues and work with suppliers to resolve them.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Performance will be measured through a combination of financial, operational, traveler-experience, compliance, and risk KPIs, including:
- Total corporate travel spend
- Travel-cost savings
- Negotiated-rate savings
- Airfare savings
- Hotel savings
- Travel-policy compliance
- Preferred-supplier utilization
- Online-booking adoption
- Advance-booking compliance
- Booking accuracy
- Traveler satisfaction
- Travel-support response time
- Travel-issue resolution time
- Supplier SLA performance
- Travel-disruption resolution
- Travel-risk compliance
- Traveler-tracking coverage
- Expense-processing accuracy
- Travel-budget variance
- Travel-program ROI
Candidate Profile
The successful candidate should have strong experience in corporate travel management, business travel, travel procurement, travel operations, hospitality, travel-management companies, or a closely related discipline.
Experience managing travel programs across multiple countries, business units, or large employee populations would be highly advantageous.
The candidate should combine commercial and analytical skills with a strong customer-service mindset and the ability to manage sensitive travel, safety, and executive-support requirements.
What You'll Bring
- Proven experience in corporate travel management, travel procurement, travel operations, or a related field.
- Strong knowledge of corporate air, hotel, ground transportation, and travel-management services.
- Experience negotiating airline, hotel, TMC, car-rental, and other travel-supplier agreements.
- Strong understanding of corporate travel policies and expense-management processes.
- Experience managing travel budgets and analyzing travel expenditure.
- Strong analytical and reporting skills.
- Advanced Excel skills and experience with travel-spend analysis.
- Familiarity with travel-management systems, online booking tools, expense platforms, and GDS technologies.
- Knowledge of major GDS platforms such as Amadeus, Sabre, or Travelport is advantageous.
- Experience with travel-risk management and traveler-duty-of-care programs.
- Strong understanding of international travel requirements and visa processes.
- Excellent negotiation and supplier-management capabilities.
- Strong customer-service and stakeholder-management skills.
- Excellent communication and problem-solving abilities.
- Ability to manage complex itineraries, urgent requests, disruptions, and competing priorities.
- Strong attention to detail and ability to handle confidential traveler information.
- Experience supporting executive travel is advantageous.
- Experience managing group travel, conferences, and corporate events is advantageous.
- Familiarity with travel technology, automation, AI-enabled travel platforms, and analytics is advantageous.
- Ability to work independently and effectively within a fully remote environment.
- Relevant degree or diploma in Travel & Tourism, Hospitality, Business Administration, Procurement, Supply Chain, or a related discipline.
- Professional certifications in corporate travel, travel management, procurement, or hospitality are advantageous.
- Experience working with UAE or wider GCC corporate travel programs is highly desirable.
- Arabic language proficiency is advantageous.