THOMPSONS TRAVEL: Steady Through Turbulence

Global business travel is not an easy industry to lead right now. Survey data released by the Global Business Travel Association this year shows industry optimism falling from 59% in January to just 41% by April, with geopolitical instability now cited by nearly eight in 10 travel professionals as the leading risk to the sector. Conflict, cost pressure and disruption have become the operating environment rather than the exception, and against that backdrop, South African travel management company Thompsons Travel has kept growing regardless. CEO Sharon Leong puts the resilience down to something unglamorous but hard to fake: 40 years of getting the fundamentals right when it matters most.

Thompsons handles end-to-end corporate travel for many of South Africa’s most recognised brands, from flights, hotels and car hire through to visas, transfers and meetings and events management. “We are one of South Africa’s larger travel management companies and we handle end-to-end services for business travel,” Leong explains, of a business built around 95 people and, through a local partnership with Egencia, plugged into a much larger global network. Established in 1984, the company has spent four decades building the kind of institutional memory that only comes from staying in one place long enough to master it.

40 YEARS DEEP

Leong has spent much of her own career inside that same steady accumulation of expertise. She joined the airline sector before moving into travel management, spending 12 years at Cathay Pacific and a further 16 at Thompsons, rising from Key Account Manager through National Sales Manager to CEO. That trajectory, through both airline operations and agency leadership, gives her a view of the industry from both sides of the booking desk, one she has used to keep Thompsons deliberately focused rather than sprawling.

That discipline shows most clearly in how the company thinks about growth. Rather than chasing a physical footprint across the continent, Thompsons has stayed rooted in South Africa while leaning on global partners for international reach. “A global footprint requires a lot of cost and experience and while Africa would be ideal for us, expanding physically onto the continent brings challenges around currency, local laws and taxations, and other things that require real knowledge and expertise, and so we have been happy with being based in South Africa,” Leong says. It is not a closed door, she adds, simply a considered one: “there are always opportunities to grow our footprint, and we continue to keep our eyes open for real prospects.”

What has allowed that focus to translate into results, Leong explains, is the way Thompsons blends people with technology rather than choosing between them. “Our key differentiator is how our high-touch service meets global and local technology. Our clients get a dedicated team who are specialists, knowledgeable, and able to provide agile services, including troubleshooting seamlessly so that our customers travel smarter,” she says. It is a positioning that matters more than ever in a South African market where corporate travellers are increasingly judging providers on reliability and continuity of service rather than price alone, a response to years of infrastructure disruption that has made dependable partners a genuine competitive advantage rather than a nice-to-have.

SMARTER, NOT REPLACED

The instinct to add capability without losing what makes the service personal defines how Thompsons approaches technology going forward as a growth tool. “AI is top of mind, and many industries are trying to see how they can improve efficiencies, and at Thompsons we are focused on evolution rather than replacement,” Leong says. The goal is not to automate consultants out of the process but to free them to do the part of the job software cannot: “we want to use AI to provide responses quicker and perhaps team with our consultants so that they can still provide the empathy that is important while improving the speed.” An internal AI division is already working on exactly that, with the underlying ambition kept simple: “it’s about providing a better, seamless, end-to-end solution.”

The results are already visible elsewhere in the business. Thompsons has previously reported helping one major client cut travel expenses by 17.5% through customised booking workflows, built on the same idea of giving the easiest option for a traveller to choose from while also being the smartest one for the business. It is evidence that the technology investment is not experimental so much as an extension of a strategy already working. 

Communication, not just booking, is where Leong sees the next real shift for customers. “Everything is mobile now. In South Africa, we use WhatsApp extensively and we are trying to see if we can improve experiences for our customers through a WhatsApp channel,” she says, describing a project the company hopes to launch this year that would let it send boarding passes, tickets and live flight timing information straight to a traveller’s phone. The appeal, for Leong, is less about the technology itself than what it represents. “It’s about being in touch with the traveller and allowing them to, literally, have us in their pocket.”

It is a small idea aimed at a familiar problem. “There is nothing worse than arriving at the terminal and flights being delayed or issues at the airport. This communication would allow us to at least keep customers informed and help to make the experience seamless,” Leong says. In an industry where the only certainty is that something will eventually go wrong, that has always been Thompsons’ real offer: not the absence of disruption, but the presence of someone who has seen it before and knows exactly what to do next.