Business Accommodation and Negotiated Rates

Accommodation is the second largest line in most South African travel budgets and the one where consumer prices and corporate rates diverge the most. RTM Travel books business accommodation against negotiated corporate rates with South African hotel groups including Southern Sun and City Lodge, and against international inventory for outbound travel, with the negotiated discount passed through to the client in full.

There is a specific failure that we see in almost every unmanaged programme. A traveller books a property on a consumer site at what looks like a good rate, pays with a personal card, and expenses it. The company pays the consumer price, loses the corporate rate, loses the consolidated invoice, loses the VAT position on a portion of the spend, and has no record of where the employee slept if something goes wrong that night. The nightly rate was fine. Everything around it was not.

What a negotiated corporate rate actually gives you

• ●A rate below the public price for the same room, held for the contract period rather than moving with demand.
• ●Terms that suit business travel. Later cancellation cut-offs and flexible check-in matter more than the last hundred rand when a flight moves.
• ●Bill-back to the company, so the traveller is not carrying company spend on a personal card and the invoice arrives already reconciled.
• ●Inclusions that would otherwise be extras, typically breakfast and internet, which are the two most common surprise lines on a hotel bill.
• ●A known standard. Properties that have been used before by business travellers from the same programme, which is a duty of care position as much as a comfort one.

Rate caps by city, not one number for the country

A single national accommodation cap is the most common mistake in a South African travel policy. Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban do not price alike, and Cape Town in particular moves sharply with season. A cap that is generous in Johannesburg in June is unusable in Cape Town in December, and the predictable result is a policy that is quietly ignored for a quarter of the year. We set caps per city, and revisit them when the market moves rather than annually out of habit.

Accommodation and duty of care

Where your people sleep is a duty of care question, not only a cost one. An employer who cannot say which property an employee is in tonight cannot claim to have taken reasonable steps to protect them. Booking accommodation through a managed programme means the property, the room and the check-in are on record, and the after-hours team can reach the traveller through the property if a phone is off. That record is also what an employer relies on to demonstrate compliance after the fact.

If you are writing or rewriting the accommodation section of your policy, the practical structure is set out in our guide to writing a corporate travel policy for a South African business, and the enforcement side is covered under travel policy and approval management.

Frequently Asked Questions