Connect Travel Group, through its subsidiaries Travel Cue and Blue Marine Travel, provides workforce travel and mobility management to the maritime, offshore, and commercial sectors.
For Group CEO Nagender Rao Chilkuri, the greatest growth opportunity lies in the group’s ability to manage an increasingly complex aviation and mobility ecosystem while providing multinational clients with a seamless global travel solution. Key to delivering this local-global model are IATA’s Billing & Settlement Plan (BSP) and GoGlobal accreditation program.
The WTTC is forecasting that travel growth will continue to outpace economic growth, while IATA sees passenger numbers doubling by 2050. Where do you see the greatest opportunities for growth in the travel sector, particularly in the corporate market that you serve?
The greatest opportunity for growth lies not simply in handling more journeys, but in redefining the role that travel management companies and agencies play within the wider aviation ecosystem.
In the years following the pandemic, many expected technology and virtual collaboration to reduce the need for business travel. Instead, organizations have rediscovered the importance of physical presence in building trust, developing partnerships, and delivering projects across borders. Digital communication has not replaced the value of bringing people together.
This is particularly evident in the specialized sectors we serve, including maritime, oil & gas, energy, yachting, cruise, and cross-border project mobility. In these industries, travel is operationally critical rather than discretionary. Crew members, engineers, technical specialists, and project teams frequently need to be mobilized at short notice, often to remote or operationally challenging locations.
When such travel is disrupted, the consequences can extend well beyond the traveler, affecting vessel movements, crew changes, asset availability, and project schedules.
From an agency perspective, this creates an opportunity to move beyond the traditional role of processing bookings. The agency of the future must become an orchestrator of mobility, connecting airlines, accommodation providers, ground transportation, technology platforms, corporate systems, and traveler-support services within one coordinated ecosystem.
As airline distribution becomes more dynamic and fragmented, agencies will also have an important role in making content accessible, comparable, and serviceable. Corporate clients need more than the lowest available fare. They need to understand the conditions, flexibility, ancillaries, servicing implications, and total cost associated with each option. For airlines, agencies can provide valuable access to clearly defined corporate and specialist traveler segments while helping ensure that new distribution capabilities translate into a consistent end-to-end customer experience.
For Connect Travel Group, the opportunity is therefore to combine global reach, specialist sector knowledge, technology, data, and round-the-clock human support. As travel demand grows, the most successful agencies will not necessarily be those that process the largest number of transactions. They will be those that make an increasingly complex aviation and mobility ecosystem easier to navigate; for travelers, corporate customers, and airline partners alike.
Working across several markets, what are the biggest challenges your company faces?
The biggest challenge is not any single issue, but the increasing fragmentation of the corporate travel ecosystem. Operating across multiple markets means navigating different regulatory frameworks, payment infrastructures, currencies, tax requirements, data-protection standards, and supplier practices while clients rightly expect a consistent global service.
Payments are a particular area of complexity. Corporate customers increasingly want flexible solutions such as virtual cards, central billing, direct debit, and pre-funded accounts. However, payment capabilities vary considerably by country, banking system, and airline. The industry therefore needs solutions that provide greater interoperability, transparency, and control, while reducing fraud, reconciliation effort, and the cost of cross-border settlement.
Cash-flow management is closely connected to this. Travel management companies often sit between airlines and corporate clients, but the payment obligations on each side do not always align. Airlines may require rapid or guaranteed settlement, while corporate customers expect extended credit terms. During periods of disruption or high booking volumes, this mismatch can create significant exposure. A more sustainable model requires clearer allocation of credit risk and wider adoption of secure, automated settlement solutions.
Regulation presents another challenge. Data privacy, tax, consumer protection, immigration, sanctions, and financial-compliance requirements differ across jurisdictions and continue to evolve. For agencies supporting crew movements and cross-border projects, we must also consider whether a traveler can legally enter, transit through, or work at a destination. Compliance can no longer be treated as a final check at the point of ticketing; it must be embedded throughout the booking and fulfilment process.
Identity and payment fraud are also becoming more sophisticated. Addressing this requires closer collaboration among airlines, agencies, technology providers, banks and corporate customers.
Airline retailing introduces a further dimension. Greater personalization and more dynamic content offer clear benefits, but corporate travel requires transparency, comparability and serviceability. Agencies must be able to identify the total value of an offer, including fare conditions, baggage, seating, flexibility and after-sales servicing and not simply compare the headline price. Content that can be booked but cannot be changed, refunded, or reconciled efficiently creates additional operational cost for every party.
Ultimately, our challenge is to reconcile global consistency with local complexity.
How do the BSP and GoGlobal Accreditation Program help you manage these challenges?
The BSP and GoGlobal accreditation framework align closely with Connect Travel Group’s proposition: providing multinational clients with one seamless global travel solution, supported by consistent governance, service delivery, and financial control.
Our clients increasingly want to operate through a single global travel partner rather than manage different agencies, processes, and reporting arrangements in each country. To deliver that effectively, we need an equally integrated framework behind the scenes. BSP provides the standardized foundation for airline reporting, remittance, and settlement, while GoGlobal allows us to manage our accreditation and financial capacity at group level.
This is particularly valuable for Connect Travel Group because our ownership, governance, and treasury are centrally controlled. Instead of arranging and maintaining separate financial assessments and multiple bank guarantees across individual markets, GoGlobal provides one set of financial criteria, a single financial guarantee, and group-level control of Remittance Holding Capacity based on aggregate usage. This enables our central treasury to allocate funds and financial capacity more efficiently across the network.
The benefits extend directly to our clients. A centrally managed structure allows us to support multinational travel programs with greater consistency, whether a booking originates in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Australia, or the Americas. Clients can retain local fulfilment, market knowledge, and access to relevant airline content while benefiting from unified account management, service standards, data consolidation, reporting, and financial oversight.
GoGlobal therefore supports more than administrative efficiency. It enables the operating model required to deliver a genuinely global travel program.
At a time when digital fraud is increasing, how does IATA accreditation help build trust and protect travelers?
Digital fraud is becoming more sophisticated across the travel industry. It now extends beyond stolen payment details to include phishing, account takeovers, false booking websites, impersonation of legitimate agencies, and manipulated traveler identities. Artificial intelligence is making fraudulent communications increasingly convincing, which means that neither corporations nor travelers should have to rely solely on their own ability to identify a potential threat.
IATA accreditation provides Connect Travel Group with an independently verifiable framework through which our legitimacy, industry standing, and relationship with airlines can be established. Our IATA identity gives clients and travelers a practical means of distinguishing an accredited travel management company from an unknown or potentially fraudulent intermediary.
This is especially important for the multinational corporations we serve. Crew members, engineers, and project personnel are often mobilized at short notice. In these circumstances, speed cannot come at the expense of verification. Our responsibility is to make the process both efficient and secure.
IATA accreditation does not eliminate digital fraud, nor should it be considered a complete security solution. For Connect Travel Group, its value lies in providing a trusted industry foundation upon which we build our own technology, cybersecurity, staff awareness, transaction monitoring, and group-level governance.
> Learn more about the IATA Billing & Settlement Plan (BSP)
