At a restaurant, it’s impolite. In corporate travel, it just not right! 

Picture this: 

The uncouth diner “Double-Dipper” sitting in your booth. I’m sure most of you have had the experience – either in your home or at a restaurant – of sharing an appetizer for the table (chips and salsa, fried calamari and pomodoro sauce) with a dinner guest who scoops his/her titbit into the dip, takes a half-bite and then dips the remnant back in the same sauce that the table was sharing. It’s enough to make you skip to the main course. We commonly call that “Double-Dipping,” and other than when I’m dining just with my wife, we would never share the remnants of our first bite with our dinner table companions.   

What is Double Dipping in Corporate Travel? 

Double dipping in our travel industry is the practice of receiving value/ compensation/ benefits from more than one source, or more than one benefit from the same source. When it’s known, or understood and allowed, that’s not an issue. An example of that is when a frequent traveler qualifies for an upgrade at the airport and also receives frequent flier points for the trip. That’s an accepted practice that applies to all frequent travelers under identical circumstances.

There’s a whole menu of double-dipping that is “under the radar” – that is, it’s invisible, inaudible (you may not have heard of it), un-auditable, nor is it uniformly applied across the client base of the supplier (airline, hotel, TMC) – but I need to stay within the word-count of this article.

Examples of Double Dipping in Corporate Travel:

FBT (Frequent Business Traveler) Points D-D – It’s known and accepted that business travelers earn airline miles personally even though the Company pays for the ticket. Savvy travelers know that the higher the airfare, the higher on the upgrade list they move up, and in many cases the higher the miles they earn for that flight. The best way for a traveler to optimize (game the system), is to wait until the last-minute to book the flight which typically results in a higher airfare.

TMC D-D – When the airlines discontinued Point of Sale Commissions (two decades ago) Travel Agencies re-branded as Travel Management Companies and justified that name-change because they said they no longer worked for the airlines; they “worked for the Corporate Client.” Under that new banner, the TMCs charged their clients a “transaction fee,” yet they continued to earn overrides, point-of-sale commissions for high-yield fares, GDS income and hotel commissions. Failing to disclose their income to the clients who were also paying fees is another form of double dipping – the TMC receiving dual-income for the same transaction without transparency.

GDS Compensation Tied to Cabin Class – A few years ago, a GDS and a major airline changed their standard compensation model in that the airline was willing to pay a higher segment fee to the GDS for higher-priced fares, in exchange for paying no incentive on the lowest fares (i.e. Basic Economy). The model made good business sense for the airline; but when the GDS in turn shares that higher incentive payment (portion) with their TMC customers, there’s an additional incentive for the TMC to steer bookings towards a higher fare. If it is disclosed to the TMC’s clients, I have no issues with it.

M&E (Meetings and Incentive) Program D-D – Larger companies that host meetings for hundreds (or thousands) of attendees (internal and clients) will use internal meeting planners if there’s a significant number of meetings each year. But in many cases the meetings sourcing and planning is outsourced to a third party (TMC or meeting planning company). We’ve seen instances where the “planner” charged a fee per person for setting up the meeting but failed to disclose that they also received a commission (10 percent or more) from the hotel. 

The added challenge of the commissions paid from the hotel is that it’s tied to the price per night for the room. So if meeting A is at a 3-star hotel, and meeting B is at a 5-star resort, the planner will earn double the commissions for the same work (actually less work because the 5-star property also provides meetings support on-site).

How Can the Travel Manager/Procurement Manager Mitigate Double-Dipping? 

Transparency in corporate travel will always be an issue as long as there are undisclosed sources of funds. I’m not saying that the TMCs must provide an “open book,” but for any given client with a significant spend portfolio, the TMC should be transparent in the multitude of supplier payments, not necessarily the amount of them. 

Under that model, unattached hotel bookings can command a higher transaction fee (to cover the TMC’s loss of GDS and hotel commissions), and on the flip side, fully compliant bookings should have a lower transaction fee if the TMC is also earning hotel commissions.

In Summary: Trust but Verify

The best way to ensure the integrity of the financial relationship between the TMC, the suppliers and the corporation is for the TMC to disclose their full universe of supplier compensation (not the amounts) and work with the client to create a fee model that’s based on the ability of the corporate client to audit the travel program on an annual basis.

Another option (that I coincidentally developed 29 years ago) is to have the corporation receive all hotel commissions directly from the hotels (the CTD model), and the TMC no longer has the risk of unattached or net hotel rates and can keep the airline and GDS income in their pocket. 

Andrew W. Menkes, CTC, is the Founder and CEO of Partnership Travel Consulting, a global corporate travel sourcing and strategy company. A business travel pioneer, Andrew has led technology innovation in the industry, including the first internet-based electronic ticket purchase. He was the first travel manager to be accredited by ARC to operate a Corporate Travel Department. He has been named Travel Manager of the Year, listed twice in the Top 25 Most Influential Business Travel Executives, and was the first travel buyer to be inducted into the Business Travel Hall of Fame. In January of 2025, Andrew also took over as President of Fare Audit, Inc. a corporate travel audit firm for airfares and hotel rates