I often helped with organising my son’s Cub Scouts weekends and what I quickly learnt was that it’s not about eliminating the chaos – it’s about navigating it. You cannot control or plan for everything. It’s logistics, leadership, crisis management, and emotional intelligence all rolled into one muddy, noisy, unforgettable experience, complete with inexhaustible, ready-for-action kids. 

Parents arrive armed with oversized bags, half-labelled kit, and vague assurances that “everything they need is in there somewhere…” Leaders try to check names, medications, dietary requirements, and emergency contacts – all while a growing number of pumped-up Cubs immediately start frantically running off in different directions. Once the weekend is underway, the real challenge begins. How do you set boundaries and ensure it runs smoothly while embracing the inevitable unpredictability?

Business travel isn’t too dissimilar. There are many moving parts, quite literally, and travel managers have the job – like I did with the Cubs – to ensure everyone gets to where they are supposed to be, on time, safely and in an enjoyable way. Organising group travel, especially offshore, film crew and sports teams is even more complex.

It comprises multi-layered logistics; many origins to one destination; multiple destinations and one moving project; mixed transport modes; accommodation challenges; weather, political and geographical unknowns; immigration; baggage and freight; and duty-of care tracking, to name just a few.

There’s a human challenge as well. These travellers are often fatigued, work in high pressure and/or dangerous environments and need seamless transitions to stay safe and also productive. This complexity has presented a barrier to entry for most TMCs – until now.

Several TMCs seem to be beefing up specialist departments, consortiums have been formed and others seem to be jumping on the bandwagon too, all joining the party because they’ve seen competitors doing the same thing. It’s hotting up.

The reason is enablement through advancements in technology. Previously, complex organisational processes had to be done manually on spreadsheets. But now customised digital tools are being introduced that enable group level data – like travel budgets – to be handled at the same time as detailed traveller info, like passport and visas.

Tripgrid is a great example of how far technology has come in this space, users can book flights for an entire team in one booking flow, with visibility into real-time flight content, 24/7 support, stored traveller profiles, group checkout, and live flight tracking. The time-saving benefits are considerable. You can book 20+ flights in less than 30 minutes, make significant savings on transaction fees, including the ability to cancel flights without paying an offline service fee.

Agentic artificial intelligence is set to automate group travel even further. Imagine you manage a motorcycle racing team. By feeding the dates and locations of races, and the details of each team member, into agentic AI, you can start the process requesting flights for the tour without having to do all the work manually.

That said, crew and team travel is absolutely not a sector which can rely on automation alone. You need experienced, expert travel professionals who know the quirks of the marketplace, have the right contacts and can handle a fast-changing, highly pressured environment where mistakes have big consequences. I will be interested to see how quickly TMCs entering this market can gain a reputation for handling it well. 

Who will earn that prestigious Crew Travel badge to sew on to their metaphorical green shirts? I do wonder…

tripstax.com