Skyscanner's new corporate travel planning tool could save you 10% and 30 minutes

Global travel search engine Skyscanner is known around these parts as much for its oracle-like ability to predict the exact moment to buy holiday airfare and tendency to gaze far off into the future as it is for actually helping fliers book flights. The company is now tackling the corporate world with a new tool that could save companies big bucks and plenty of time.

Skyscanner's new TravelPro technology allows employees to sidestep the traditional business trip approval process within a company, allowing users to directly search for their own travel arrangements. TravelPro builds users' itineraries around the specific needs of a trip, right down to the exact time of a meeting, allowing users to search with a greater specificity than they might normally see. Once a trip is selected, TravelPro sends the itinerary along to a designated higher-up within the company for approval.

If that sounds a bit too much like handing over the reins entirely to a company's employees, TravelPro also allows a Travel Admin to search and secure arrangements for the whole company on their behalf.

TravelPro's Ross McNairn tells Tnooz that he estimates the new service could save traditional corporate travel agents as much as 30 minutes per trip, and eliminate the 7-10% additional fees of a travel agent. So could this mean the end of corporate travel agents? Only time will tell.