To get corporate clients for a travel agency, pick one kind of company, find the person who books their trips, and offer a trial: handle one month of their travel for a fee you state up front. The buyer is rarely called a travel manager. In a company of 20 to 300 people it is an executive assistant, an office manager or a finance lead who is tired of booking flights on a personal card and chasing receipts.
Leisure travel and corporate travel are different businesses. Leisure clients buy a trip once. Corporate clients buy every week, they care about change fees and receipts more than the hotel pool, and they stay for years if you save them time. That makes them worth the slower sale.
Choose a niche before you write to anyone
"Corporate travel" is too wide to explain in one email. Narrow it until a stranger can see themselves in it.
- By industry: film crews, construction firms with site visits, engineering consultancies, medical device sales teams, universities.
- By trip type: team offsites, trade shows, sales-team road trips, sporting events for clubs.
- By place: every company within an hour of your office, whom you can visit in person.
Say an agency in Minneapolis picks "regional engineering firms that send crews to job sites." That is a list of perhaps 150 companies, a clear promise (we book crews and handle the last-minute changes) and an obvious first question: how do you move people when a site schedule slips?
Who books the trips
| Company size | Likely booker | What they hate |
|---|---|---|
| Under 30 people | Founder or office manager | Losing an hour on fares and receipts |
| 30 to 150 | Executive assistant, operations lead | Rebooking at the last minute, expense reports |
| 150 to 500 | Finance or procurement, sometimes HR | Spend with no visibility, policy breaches |
| Event-driven (conferences, sports) | Event or team manager | Group changes and room blocks |
Write to the person in the right-hand column's situation, not to a generic "travel department." If the site lists no one, search the company's team page for "executive assistant," "office manager" or "operations." The methods in how to find office managers and facility managers carry over almost unchanged.
Make an offer a busy person can accept
Corporate buyers will not switch for "better service." They will try something with an end date. A workable offer:
- "Give us one month of your travel. We book it all, one invoice at month end."
- "We will compare every fare we book against what you would have paid, and show you the difference."
- "If you do not like it, you go back to how you book now. Nothing to cancel."
Decide your fee before you offer it. Agencies charge in different ways, such as a per-booking fee, a monthly management fee or commissions from suppliers. Whatever yours is, write it in one sentence on the first call, because a corporate buyer who finds a fee late will leave.
The first email
Subject: Booking crew travel for Lindahl Engineering
Hi Keisha,
I run a small travel agency in Minneapolis that books travel for engineering firms with crews on the road. I saw Lindahl opened a Duluth office this year, which probably means more flights and hotels booked at short notice.
Who handles that today? If it's you, I would like to offer one month of your bookings handled by us, with one invoice at the end, to see whether it saves you time.
Priya Nandakumar
priya@example.com
210 Lowry Ave, Minneapolis
If you'd rather not hear from me, reply "no thanks."
It names the type of company, shows she looked at them, asks who owns the job and makes a small offer. The street address and the opt-out line are there because CAN-SPAM requires both in commercial email, business-to-business included. For follow-ups, the spacing in the cold email follow-up sequence works here. In-person drop-ins work too, because a local agency can walk into an office with a card and a one-page price sheet.
The first meeting
Spend most of it asking. Questions worth asking:
- How many trips do you book in a typical month, and how far ahead?
- Who books them now, and what do they do when plans change?
- What did the last bad trip cost, in money or in time?
- Do you have a travel policy, and who checks that it is followed?
- Which card do people use, and who reconciles the receipts?
The answers tell you what to promise. If they book 40 trips a month and a coordinator spends a day reconciling receipts, your pitch is time. If they have no policy and costs creep, your pitch is control. The structure in the sales call agenda fits a first conversation like this.
Where else corporate leads come from
- Existing leisure clients. Ask which of them own or run a business. Your best corporate lead may already be on your books.
- Referrals from other advisers. Accountants, office-space brokers and event planners all know companies with travel pain. See referral partners for how to set that up.
- Local business groups. Join one and attend. Introduce the one-month trial, not the agency.
- Events. Companies hosting a conference or an offsite need group bookings. Find the organizer, offer to handle the block.
Keep them once you win them
A corporate account is worth more in year three than year one, so protect it. Send a short monthly note showing what you booked, what you saved and any rebooking you handled. Name a backup agent so nobody is stranded when you are away. Ask each client for one introduction at the six-month mark, once the first invoices have been paid on time.
A 90-day plan
- Days 1 to 10: choose the niche, build a list of 100 companies, write the offer.
- Days 11 to 40: send 20 emails a week and make 10 calls or visits a week, following up every one.
- Days 41 to 70: run first meetings, start two or three trial months.
- Days 71 to 90: review the trials, convert them to standing agreements, and ask for introductions.
If the list-building and follow-up are the part that stalls, that is the work Rocketship does: you describe the companies you want in plain words, and its AI salesperson finds the people, reads each company's own website, emails them from your Gmail, follows up and books the meeting. Pricing shows what that costs on each plan.