Travel fares · Corporate travel benchmarking
Corporate travel fare benchmarking against public fares
Corporate fare benchmarking asks a simple question: for the trips your travellers actually booked, what would the public fare have been at the same lead time, from the same market? Answer it by pricing your top routes on public channels on a fixed panel, and matching booked trips against it.
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Written for
- Travel management companies (TMCs)
- Corporate travel managers and procurement teams
- Fare-audit and travel-spend analytics firms
- Airline corporate sales analysts
The short answer
- Business travel is a large spend line. GBTA expected global business travel spending to reach a record $1.57 trillion in 2025.
- A fair benchmark matches flight, cabin, fare conditions, lead time and point of sale. Today's public fare for a trip booked three weeks ago is not a benchmark.
- Channels price differently. The same fare can carry a different total through a GDS, an NDC connection or the airline's own website. Lufthansa Group, for example, introduced a €16 charge on GDS bookings in 2015.
- Collect forward, not backward: a weekly panel of your top city pairs at fixed lead times gives you a public reference for every booking you make.
The problem
What goes wrong without the right IPs
Benchmarks taken after the fact
Checking the public fare after a trip compares two different moments in a dynamic market. Without matching lead times, savings and leakage figures are mostly noise, and the airline's account manager will say so.
Different content in different channels
A TMC sees fares through its GDS and NDC connections; a traveller sees the airline's website and OTAs. Fares, bundles and surcharges can differ by channel, so the benchmark has to say which public channel it reflects.
Conditions that are not comparable
A flexible corporate fare and the cheapest non-changeable public fare are different products. Compare like with like on change and refund conditions, or report both comparisons explicitly.
The wrong home market
A company booking in Germany should be benchmarked against public fares in Germany, not against whatever market your server happens to be in. Point of sale applies to benchmarks as much as to retail.
Traveller data where it does not belong
Benchmarking needs itineraries, not people. Strip names and identifiers before any booking data reaches the collection layer, and never use traveller data to query a public site.
What to collect
What you can collect
- Itinerary
- Flight numbers, dates, cabin, from your booking data.
- Lead time at booking
- Days between booking and departure, the key you match public fares on.
- Booked fare and channel
- What you paid, and through which channel (GDS, NDC or direct).
- Public fare at matched lead time
- From your forward panel, same flight or same route and departure band.
- Fare brand and conditions
- Change, refund and baggage, so the comparison is like for like.
- Public channel observed
- The airline's website or an OTA, and the market edition.
- Point of sale
- The company's booking market, kept explicit. See point of sale.
- Observation time
- Panel prices are evidence in negotiations; timestamp them.
How it runs
How a collection run works
- 01
Pick the routes that carry the spend
From anonymised booking data, rank city pairs by spend and trips. The top few hundred usually cover most of the programme; benchmark those properly instead of everything thinly.
- 02
Build a forward panel at fixed lead times
Every week, price each top city pair from the company's home market at fixed lead times, for example 7, 14, 21 and 28 days, for the cabins you buy. This creates a public reference for any booking made in that week.
- 03
Match bookings to the panel
Match each booking to panel observations on route, departure band, cabin and nearest lead time. Report the gap with the match quality, so a weak match is visible rather than averaged away.
- 04
Separate fare, conditions and channel effects
Split the gap into what is due to the fare, to conditions (flex vs basic) and to the channel (surcharges or bundles). Each one is a different lever in a negotiation.
- 05
Report and negotiate
Present savings or leakage per route and carrier, with the panel as evidence. Repeat quarterly so you can see whether negotiated discounts hold in the public market.
Setup
Recommended setup
Benchmarking volumes are small, but each observation is evidence in a negotiation, so it has to be clean and market-correct.
| Plan | Role | Session | Targeting | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
ARC Fast Rotating residential | Weekly public-fare panel Residential exits in the home market, held for a full search-to-fare-detail flow, so the price is what a traveller in that market would see. | Sticky, about 10 minutes per search flow | Country of the company's booking market | €2.00 / GB €1.12 at 1 TB (−44%) |
ARC Ultra Premium residential | Carriers that dominate the spend Premium residential for the few carriers that carry most of the programme, where a missing observation weakens the whole benchmark. | Sticky per search flow | Country | €3.50 / GB €2.17 at 1 TB (−38%) |
Prices are list prices in EUR, excl. VAT. Volume discounts apply automatically at checkout — full ladder on the pricing page.
Connect
One connection string per market
The country, city and sticky session are tokens in the username. Change the token, change the market; keep the session handle, keep the IP.
http://USERNAME_pool-arcfast_country-de_session-k3f9a1x2_sesstime-10:PASSWORD@proxy.arcproxies.io:8000Swap _country-de for any market you quote. The full grammar is on the residential proxies page.
Illustration
What a weekly benchmark panel costs
An illustration with round numbers — your pages, payloads and retry rate will differ. The arithmetic is the real price ladder.
Assumptions
- City pairs
- 400
- Lead times
- 4 (7, 14, 21, 28 days)
- Cabins
- 2
- Booking markets
- 2
- Cadence
- weekly (4.3 a month)
- Weight per search flow
- 450 KB
- Bandwidth per month
- ≈ 13 GB
On ARC Fast
€26.00per month, excl. VAT
13 GB bought in one purchase at €2.00 / GB (list price).
The same 13 GB on ARC Ultra: €45.50 at €3.50 / GB. Route only the jobs that need it through the pricier pool.
Benchmarking is one of the lightest travel workloads: a structured panel, not a sweep. Adding hotel rates for the same cities usually costs more than the flights.
Bandwidth never expires, so a bigger single purchase is only ever cheaper per GB. See the ladder.
In depth
Corporate travel benchmarking, in depth
What a corporate fare benchmark measures
| Benchmark | Question it answers | Data it needs |
|---|---|---|
| Booked vs public, matched | Did we pay more or less than the public market at the time? | Bookings plus a forward public panel at fixed lead times |
| Negotiated discount check | Is the negotiated discount real against public fares? | Panel prices for the same fare brands and conditions |
| Channel comparison | Is our booking channel adding cost? | Public prices on the airline site vs the channel used |
| Policy compliance | Did travellers book within the lowest-logical-fare rule? | Panel alternatives on the same route and departure band |
| Lead-time policy | Would booking earlier have saved money? | Panel prices across lead times on top routes |
Matching on lead time and market
Fares are dynamic, so the only fair comparison is at the same distance from departure. A forward panel solves this by observing public prices at fixed lead times every week, so every booking has a public price taken under the same conditions within days of it.
Market matters just as much. Price the panel from the company's booking market, with exit, site edition and currency set accordingly. For flights departing an EU airport, Regulation 1008/2008 also prohibits fare discrimination based on residence, which makes any market gap you do find on those flights worth raising with the carrier.
Channels: GDS, NDC and the airline's website
Corporate bookings mostly flow through a TMC's GDS and, increasingly, NDC connections. IATA describes NDC as an XML-based standard that lets airlines create and distribute offers regardless of channel, including access to 'full and rich air content'. Public travellers see the airline's website and OTAs.
Channel can change the total. Lufthansa Group introduced a €16 charge on tickets issued through a GDS in 2015, which agents could avoid by booking through the group's own agent portal. Whatever a specific carrier does today, check it: a benchmark that ignores channel cannot tell a bad fare from an expensive channel.
Comparing like with like on fare conditions
- Match the fare brand where possible. Compare a corporate flex fare with the public flex fare on the same flight, not with the cheapest basic fare.
- Report two numbers when you cannot. 'Against equivalent conditions' and 'against the lowest public fare' answer different questions, for procurement and for policy.
- Include bags and seats. A basic public fare plus a bag and a seat can cost more than the bundle your corporate fare already includes. See airline ancillary prices.
- Keep fare components. EU rules require fare, taxes and charges to be itemised; storing them separately keeps tax differences between origins out of your savings figures.
Hotels, rail and the rest of the programme
Air is usually the start, not the whole programme. Hotel spend is often benchmarked the same way, with a panel of hotel rates in your top cities at fixed lead times, compared with negotiated rates. Rate parity checks show whether those rates are undercut on public channels.
On short corridors, rail is the real alternative to air for many trips; a rail fare panel on those city pairs supports mode-shift policy with prices rather than assumptions. All of these share the setup described under travel fare aggregation.
Works with anything that takes a proxy URL
- Python requests / httpx
Playwright- Scrapy
- Docker
FAQ
Questions
Something not covered? Write to contact@arcproxies.io.
How do you benchmark corporate airfares?
Price your top city pairs on public channels every week at fixed lead times, such as 7, 14, 21 and 28 days, from the company's booking market. Then match each booking to the panel price at the same route, cabin, departure band and lead time, comparing like-for-like fare conditions.
Why not just check today's public fare for past trips?
Because airfares are dynamic. A public fare today for a trip booked three weeks ago reflects a different lead time and different remaining inventory. Only a price observed at the same lead time, around the same date, is a fair comparison.
Do GDS and airline website fares differ?
They can. Content, fare bundles and surcharges can vary by channel. Some carriers have added charges to GDS-issued tickets, for example the €16 charge Lufthansa Group introduced in 2015. Record which channel each price comes from.
Which market should a corporate benchmark be priced from?
The company's booking market, the country its travellers book in, with exit IP, site edition and currency set to match. Benchmarks priced from another market measure a different set of fares.
Do I need traveller data to run a benchmark?
No. You need itineraries, dates, cabins, prices and lead times, not names or profiles. Strip personal data before booking records reach the collection layer, and never use traveller details to query public websites.
How much bandwidth does a corporate benchmark panel use?
Very little. In our illustration, 400 city pairs at four lead times, two cabins and two markets, weekly, use about 12 GB a month. Bandwidth is billed per GB with no subscription and never expires, which suits quarterly review cycles.
Sources & review
Last reviewed by the ARC Proxies team. Prices are read from the live catalog at build time.
- [1]Global Business Travel Association (GBTA): 2025 GBTA Business Travel Index Outlook
- [2]IATA: New Distribution Capability (NDC)
- [3]Travelweek: Lufthansa Group to charge 16 euros for GDS bookings as of Sept. 1
- [4]EUR-Lex (Official Journal of the European Union): Regulation (EC) No 1008/2008 on common rules for the operation of air services in the Community
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