Veranika Ramaniuk

Travel & Operations · Independent Practice

Veranika Ramaniuk

Almost ten years separate the overnight bus and the private charter. I walked that whole distance myself, one step at a time — which is how I can still do both: resourceful and warm on a shoestring, or with no budget ceiling at all, holding the same care either way.

Warsaw, Poland · veroromaniuk@gmail.com · linkedin.com/in/vramaniuk

I studied international relations, then spent the years since crossing borders professionally — first from the budget end: couriering, then handling incoming bookings for a travel company while I was still at university. Four years running programs at an education-travel agency followed, then event and client-facing roles, and for the past two years, business travel management for a fintech spread across nine legal entities and five countries.

Along the way I've slept in ten-bed hostels and in the best hotel suites I've ever seen, sometimes for the same trip's different travelers. The budget changes. What I actually do doesn't: build the plan, chase every loose end until it's closed, and hold the standard whether anyone's watching or not — cheap and done with heart, or lavish and done with just as much heart.

It’s a lot more than “buying plane tickets,” which is what most people picture the moment they hear “travel manager.”

Why this site exists

Selected Work

A few of the programs I've owned end to end. Some details are generalized to respect confidentiality from past engagements.

Oman · Company-wide annual event

The charter to Oman

This is the one I'd point to first — the most important of the company's thirteen annual events, and it had no playbook when I started. I built one: sourcing and negotiating the charter provider, handling the compliance and documentation a flight that size requires, and working out connecting logistics so travelers arriving from a dozen different countries could actually make departure on time.

On top of the flight itself: ground transfers for every participant, including the CEO, some of whom were coming in from separate flights, and a hand in coordinating with the hotel directly.

  • 250 event attendees
  • 60 on the charter

I don’t think in “big” or “small” events anymore — just in what still needs closing before departure.

Everyone made their connections. The flight, the transfers, and the hotel side ran without a hitch.

Kyoto · Cape Town · Brazil

Three crises, one week

A management offsite in Kyoto meant Japan visa applications for participants from ten countries, each with a different residency situation and its own document requirements. The same week, Dubai and Doha airports closed without warning — mid-way through a separate team meetup in Cape Town, which meant rebooking ten people's return travel without wrecking the rest of their itineraries. In between, the CEO's charter to Brazil went doubtful less than 24 hours before departure.

All three ran in parallel. Visa applications had fixed embassy deadlines and zero room for error, so those were worked and double-checked first; the rebookings and the CEO's backup plan moved alongside them, one running checklist keeping track of everything still open.

  • 10 countries, one visa run
  • 3 crises, one week

I don't love pressure for its own sake — I've just learned I don't fold under it.

Every visa was approved, the CEO's trip went ahead, and the Cape Town team got home on schedule — none of it visible to anyone it was happening for.

Company-wide rollout · One booking platform

From spreadsheets to a system

Travel used to mean booking flights and hotels manually, one at a time, across whatever website had availability — no single record of what had been booked, no real visibility into spend, policy checked by hand or not at all.

I moved the company onto a booking platform that handled requests directly, centralized every employee's bookings and linked payments to them, and let me pull spend and reporting by legal entity. Policy filters went into the system itself, so requests stayed compliant automatically instead of being checked one by one.

  • 9 legal entities
  • 5 countries

The best part wasn't the software — it was not dreading month-end reconciliation anymore.

Less manual work per booking, real visibility into spend across entities and countries, and compliance built into the process instead of caught after the fact.

Business & first class · 20+ countries

The standard, regardless of budget

Negotiating with luxury vendors and private charter providers, arranging business and first-class travel and five-star stays as the default for executive itineraries — the same obsessive standard I learned booking budget trips a decade earlier, applied at a different price point.

When a charter went doubtful less than a day before a CEO's departure, that standard is what found two more sourcing channels, ran the legal and safety check, and had a hybrid commercial-flight-plus-secured-transport backup ready before it was needed.

  • 100% approval rate
  • 70+ high-stakes cases

Careful is careful, whatever the budget. That part has never changed for me.

A 100% approval rate across 70+ high-stakes cases — the number is a byproduct of the habit, not the goal.

Working Together

I take on independent, project-based work alongside ongoing roles. A few shapes this tends to take:

  1. Executive offsites & charter production

    End-to-end ownership of a flagship company event — vendor sourcing, compliance, logistics, on-the-ground delivery.

  2. Travel program & policy design

    Building the policy, vendor relationships, and booking system a growing team doesn't have yet.

  3. Crisis & contingency planning

    A second sourcing channel and a backup plan ready before the first one falls through.

  4. Multi-entity travel systems

    Spend tracking, invoice reconciliation, and reporting across legal entities and currencies.