Research by Amadeus, a GDS and travel technology company, has shown that is costs business travel agents £32.60 to issue a ticket.
This compared with the £23.10 it cost consolidators to do the same task.
The research found that while business travel agencies averaged 1,172 tickets per year per full time employees, the figure for consolidators was 1,410 tickets.
The research for the white paper, Understanding travel agency cost drivers and ways to optimise business in the UK and Ireland was carried out by Hermes, a management consultancy firm, for the GDS among eight UK agencies of varying sizes.
It found that agencies earned 52.5% of their revenue from service fees, 27.6% from commissions and 19.9% from volume bonuses.
In the second part of the study, another management consultancy firm, UPS Professional Services tested 46 agents from 11 different agencies against the clock using the UK's three main distributions system, Amadeus, Sabre and Galileo.
*BTE will be carrying a fuller report on the white paper's findings next week.