Global solutions, locally managed

Where VCK Marine Travel is the Dutch leading Travel Management Company (TMC) for marine and offshore travel, the International Marine Travel Group (IMTG) is one of the leading global TMCs in this particular niche of the travel industry. Since 2013, IMTG is headquartered in Amsterdam. VCK Travel, since the early days a partner of IMTG, has taken up ownership of the company, which is now lead by Michael van der Woude.

“We fully understand that the replacement of seagoing and offshore crew, is a global business, rather than just a local operation”, says Michael van der Woude, managing director of IMTG. That is where IMTG steps in. Since 1999 IMTG has been providing multinational travel services to shipping and offshore companies having a demand for cross-border solutions. Since then, the company has been developing tools and solutions that can be implemented at a global level, and are also available at a local or regional level. “This is a unique situation”, Michael further clarifies. “We provide travel solutions that have a global coverage and can be used worldwide, thus fulfilling multinational shipping company’s global requirements, but at the same time we manage local requirements.” It enables our clients to stick to local advantages and custom procedures, while maintaining a global approach and the ability to jointly arrange for procurement and reporting”.

IMTG's success is based on providing superior crew replacement services. Different from what has become common practise, IMTG’s focus is on the full Purchase to Pay process of scheduling crew replacements. “Many TMC’s focus on the price of a ticket, which is obvious realizing that the price is roughly 60% of the total costs of crew replacements”. However, in contemporary industries the cost of labor involved to scheduling crew replacements has become significant. Many crew management departments are still based in high costs countries. Although manning agents in the Far East take over seconding tasks, it might make sense to explore options to improve efficiencies and drill down processing costs in those areas where operational costs are still relatively high. The range of solutions and tools provided by IMTG, support these cost savings and efficiency improvements. As an example, Crew.NET, the communication tool that interfaces in-between a HR-system of a shipping company and IMTG’s booking tool, results in a minimum 30% cut off of the time needed to schedule a replacement. Those are the tools that can now be used worldwide.

What is absolutely distinguishing from the old fashion travel industry, is the transparency that all IMTG partners worldwide have now adopted in their business models. Where transaction fees seem to cover the expenses and revenue targets of travel suppliers, the application of so called mark-ups has become widely used, resulting in diffuse commercial models and misty operations. IMTG’s unique business model provides solutions that prevent this and assures full insight in all costs and revenues related to the provision of crew replacement services.