Partner Interview with Scott Millar - Saving unused tickets

Director of Sales and Strategic Partnerships at Magnatech

Can you give us a brief introduction of yourself, your background, and Magnatech?

I have spent more than two decades at Magnetech — a company that has been serving the travel management industry for over 35 years. As Director of Sales and Strategic Partnerships, I sit at the intersection of technology and the real-world needs of Travel Management Companies (TMCs).

Magnetech's suite covers the complete operational life cycle of a travel booking, from pre-ticketing all the way through to traveller safety and open ticket management. Their flagship product, OnTrack Plus, connects directly to the Global Distribution System (GDS) to track and manage unused airline tickets throughout their valid lifetime.

What service does Magnatech provide and what key problem does it solve?

The Problem Nobody Likes Talking About: Lost Credits

Every corporate travel programme has them — unused tickets. A meeting gets cancelled. A trip gets rescheduled. And somewhere in a GDS, a ticket sits with residual value that nobody is actively tracking. For a corporate traveller making ten to fifteen trips a month, that adds up fast.

Magnetech's OnTrack Plus ensures that no open credit slips through the cracks. The system identifies pre-flight tickets and checks their status three days after the last scheduled flight segment, keeping that credit picture current and visible. The result: travel consultants can act on available credits in real time, exchanging tickets for future value rather than letting money expire unused.

 "There's significant value sitting in unused tickets, but that often goes unrealised. We make sure that doesn't happen." 

Where does your service fit into the TMC workflow?

Right in the Engine Room of the TMC Workflow

Magnetech operates across both the UK and US markets, and while the two have their nuances, it is clear that the fundamental workflow — book, ticket, comply, travel — is the same on both sides of the Atlantic.

What makes Magnetech's approach distinctive is that it works with what TMCs already have in place rather than asking them to start from scratch. Automation is layered on top of existing processes, so consultants skip the manual steps they were doing before without having to learn an entirely new way of working. Implementation becomes faster, and adoption becomes easier.

• Booking made and confirmed in the GDS
• Magnetech identifies the PNR and monitors ticket status
• Open credits are surfaced automatically — no manual checking
• Umbrella Profiles is updated in real time, keeping the traveller record clean

How do you integrate with Umbrella / Midoco, and what is the benefit for the client?

A Seamless Integration with Umbrella Profiles

Umbrella Profiles, part of the MIDOCO Group, is a globally leading traveller profile management platform used by TMCs and corporations in over 105 countries. It synchronises traveller data — preferences, policies, limits — across more than 20 booking systems in real time. Think of it as the single source of truth for who a traveller is and how they should be handled.

Magnetech's integration adds a critical missing piece: the open credit picture. Rather than that data living in a separate system and requiring manual reconciliation, it appears directly inside the Umbrella profile — right where the consultant is already working.

The integration is fully automated and has impact: as Magnetech harvests PNR data from the GDS, it identifies which traveller or corporate account the ticket belongs to and populates the Umbrella profile management tool automatically. When a ticket is exchanged, cancelled, or expires, Umbrella is updated accordingly — without anyone lifting a finger.

Do you see any major challenges in the industry, and do we have the tools to solve them?

Industry Challenges — and Reasons for Optimism

Ther are three issues that keep surfacing across the industry:

• Data fragmentation. Too many systems that don't talk to each other, creating gaps in visibility.
• Shifting corporate expectations. Corporate clients no longer want end-of-month reporting — they want visibility right now.
• Duty of care. Businesses need to know where their travellers are at any given moment — and the complexity around this has grown considerably.

Magnetech addresses the duty of care question directly through its Safe2Go traveller tracking programme. More broadly, Scott's view of the future is a confident one: the best tools working together, rather than any single system trying to do everything.

On the subject of AI — the topic on everyone's lips right now — Scott is pragmatic. The technology is no longer theoretical for travel management. The question now is how best to integrate it into booking workflows and agency operations in a way that makes consultants genuinely more efficient. Magnetech is already exploring what that looks like in their product roadmap.

Partnership Built on a Shared Vision

The Magnetech and Umbrella partnership is a clear example of what best-in-class integration looks like in practice: two specialist systems, each excellent at what they do, combining to give TMCs and their clients a unified, automated, and real-time picture of the traveller journey.

If you'd like to learn more about how Umbrella Profiles and Magnetech work together, get in touch with the Umbrella team.