Nearly one-third of travel buyers are reconsidering their choice of travel management company in 2025.
According to the Global Business Travel Association (GBTA) February 2025 poll , 30% of corporate buyers are actively reevaluating or changing their TMC this year — with 39% citing dissatisfaction with technology as the primary driver, and 37% pointing to service quality concerns.
This is not a gradual shift. It is a competitive reset. Travelers now expect the same user experience from their corporate booking tool as they get from Booking.com or Expedia — seamless search, instant confirmation, and real-time updates. Many TMCs, however, are still running workflows built around systems from the 1990s and early 2000s: GDS-centric architectures, manual approval forwarding, and back-office processes that require significant consultant time to complete routine tasks.
For Asia-Pacific TMCs in particular, the timing is critical. GBTA data shows that 78% of APAC travel buyers reported higher trip volumes in 2024 — the highest rate globally — and 63% plan to increase spending further in 2025. That growth creates opportunity, but only for TMCs that can scale operations without proportionally expanding headcount. Digital transformation is no longer about incremental improvement. It is about whether a TMC can remain competitive.
Why Digital Transformation Is Now Urgent for TMCs
The 30% Problem: Technology Dissatisfaction Is Driving Churn
The GBTA figure — 30% of buyers reconsidering their TMC — is striking on its own. What makes it more consequential is the reason: technology dissatisfaction ranks as the number one factor, ahead of service quality, pricing, or relationship issues.
This aligns with earlier research. A
2022 GBTA and FCM Travel survey
found that technology capability is the single most important buying factor when corporate clients evaluate a TMC. It outranks price, service level, and even geographic coverage.
The issue is not that TMCs lack technology entirely. It is that the technology in place often feels dated when compared to consumer booking experiences. Travelers who book leisure trips on mobile apps with dynamic pricing, instant confirmations, and personalized recommendations return to work and encounter corporate booking tools with clunky interfaces, limited search filters, and multi-step approval processes that require email forwarding.
When technology becomes a friction point rather than an enabler, clients start looking elsewhere.
The Cloud Gap: Why TMCs Are Falling Behind
Travel companies have been slower than other industries to migrate to cloud infrastructure. According to an Accenture survey of travel executives , only 30% of companies in the sector have implemented cloud at scale. By comparison, financial services, retail, and manufacturing industries are significantly further ahead.
David Linthicum, Deloitte's chief cloud strategy officer, noted in the same report that travel companies are "playing catch-up" on technology investment. "They are not spending as much money as their relative peers in other industries," he said. "And they need to; there is much to be automated. They need those systems to drive better customer experiences."
The cost of staying on legacy infrastructure is not just sluggish performance. It is operational fragility. In one widely cited example, a U.S. airline was forced to cancel thousands of flights during a weather disruption because its scheduling and rebooking systems were still running on 1990s-era infrastructure. Other carriers recovered quickly once the storm passed. This airline remained grounded for days, unable to process the volume of changes required.
For TMCs, the lesson is clear: outdated systems are not merely slow. They are a liability when demand spikes, when disruptions occur, or when clients expect rapid turnaround on complex multi-leg itineraries.
The Two Technology Shifts Reshaping TMCs
New Distribution Capability (NDC) represents a fundamental shift in how airlines distribute their inventory. Unlike traditional GDS channels, which present fares in a standardized, text-based format, NDC enables airlines to offer richer content — branded fares, ancillary bundles, dynamic pricing — directly through APIs.
Adoption has been slow, but momentum is building. According to Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC) data , NDC transactions from corporate travel management companies grew from 4% of total bookings in 2024 to 7% in 2025. While still a minority share — online travel agencies account for 77% of NDC volume — the growth rate among TMCs signals a tipping point.
Why does this matter for TMCs? Because airlines are beginning to offer lower fares and exclusive inventory through NDC channels. Singapore Airlines , for instance, reported that NDC fares are approximately 6% lower than traditional GDS fares, with corporate-negotiated NDC rates running roughly 7% lower. Starting in September 2025, the carrier is making certain discounted cabin classes available exclusively through NDC, not via GDS.
The challenge is that most TMC booking tools were not designed with NDC in mind. A GBTA survey found that only 13% of travel managers in the U.S. and Canada report that their online booking tools support self-service NDC changes. Post-sale servicing — the ability to modify, cancel, or rebook NDC tickets without agent intervention — remains a major gap.
For TMCs in Asia-Pacific, the situation presents both risk and opportunity. Airlines like Singapore Airlines are ahead of the curve globally on NDC implementation. TMCs that can integrate NDC content seamlessly into their booking platforms gain a pricing advantage and access to inventory that competitors relying solely on GDS cannot offer. Those that cannot face margin erosion as clients shift bookings to providers with NDC capability.
For more on how NDC works and its implications for corporate travel, see What Is NDC in Travel?.
AI Automation: From Manual Workflows to Intelligent Systems
Artificial intelligence is moving from experimental pilot projects to operational deployment across TMCs. The GBTA February 2025 poll found that 34% of corporate travel buyers plan to incorporate AI into their programs in "significant ways" this year. Among suppliers and TMCs, adoption rates are higher: 49% of TMC professionals report that their organizations are already experimenting with agentic AI — autonomous systems capable of performing multi-step tasks without human oversight.
The primary use cases, ranked by frequency across buyers and TMCs, are:
1. Customer service automation — handling routine inquiries via chatbots or virtual assistants
2. Traveler personalization — surfacing hotel and flight options based on past behavior and stated preferences
3. Automated itinerary planning — assembling multi-leg trips with optimal connections and pricing
4. Expense reconciliation — 51% of buyers specifically plan to use agentic AI for matching bookings to expenses and flagging discrepancies
American Express Global Business Travel, the world's largest TMC, reported in August 2024 that it expects AI-driven automation to deliver 6-8% efficiency gains on inbound call routing and 2-4% improvements on client knowledge base queries and policy assistance. These are not marginal savings. For a TMC handling tens of thousands of bookings per month, efficiency gains at that scale translate into either lower operating costs or the ability to serve more clients without adding headcount.
The caveat, however, is that AI adoption brings concerns. Data privacy, security, and integration with existing systems are the top three barriers cited by buyers, suppliers, and TMCs alike. Corporate travel involves sensitive information — employee travel patterns, negotiated rates, compliance data — and any AI system handling that information must meet strict security and privacy standards.
What Travel Technology Solutions TMCs Actually Need
Self-Service Booking with Policy Enforcement
In a traditional TMC workflow, a consultant receives a travel request by email or phone, searches across GDS or supplier portals, assembles an itinerary, sends it to the traveler for review, waits for confirmation, and then processes the booking. Each step requires human attention. At low volumes, this is manageable. At scale — or when multiple bookings arrive simultaneously — it creates queues, delays, and inconsistency.
An Internet Booking Engine (IBE) removes the consultant from routine booking tasks. Travelers search, compare, and book directly through a self-service interface. Policy rules are enforced automatically at the point of selection: out-of-policy options are flagged or blocked, preferred suppliers are surfaced first, spend limits are applied without manual review.
This does not eliminate the role of the consultant. It redefines it. Instead of processing routine requests, consultants focus on complex itineraries, exception handling, and client relationship management — the areas where human judgment adds the most value.
Automated Back-Office for Invoicing and Reporting
Reconciliation is one of the most time-intensive parts of TMC operations. At month-end, consultants match booking records to supplier invoices, check totals, resolve discrepancies, and generate client reports — often by manually compiling data from multiple systems.
A connected mid-back office system automates this flow. Booking data feeds directly into the back-office platform, which generates invoices to client specification, handles multi-currency settlement, and produces management reports without manual data entry or spreadsheet exports.
When back-office data flows automatically from booking through to reporting, it also enables a higher tier of client service: proactive spend analysis. TMCs can model the cost impact of adjusting travel windows, switching preferred carriers, or converting low-priority trips to virtual meetings — and present these findings to clients as part of ongoing program management, rather than as a reactive response to budget overruns.
AI-Powered Marketing for Client Acquisition
A corporate client searching for "travel management company Singapore" on Google sees dozens of results. How does a TMC ensure it ranks on the first page?
Traditional content management systems — WordPress, Drupal, and similar platforms — were not built for search engine optimization as a core function. They allow you to publish content, but they do not tell you whether that content is optimized, what competitors are ranking for, or which keywords are losing traction in Google Search Console.
An AI-powered CMS changes that. It embeds SEO validation directly into the editor, provides real-time feedback on keyword usage and readability, integrates with Google Search Console to surface ranking trends, and flags competitor content that is outperforming yours.
How to Start Your Digital Transformation
Step 1: Identify Your Biggest Operational Bottleneck
Digital transformation should begin with a specific problem, not a general aspiration. Ask: what do clients complain about most often?
If booking turnaround time is too slow, implement self-service booking through an IBE.
If policy violations are discovered after trips have concluded, add automated policy checks at the point of booking.
If month-end reporting consumes significant consultant time, automate the back-office data flow so invoices and reports generate without manual compilation.
Prioritize client-facing pain points first — booking speed, policy compliance — and then optimize internal efficiency.
Step 2: Start with One Connected System, Not Point Solutions
The most common failure mode in TMC technology stacks is fragmentation. An IBE that does not share data with the corporate booking tool. A corporate booking tool that does not feed the back office. Reconciliation that requires manual exports and re-imports.
Effective digital transformation requires a connected stack where booking data flows automatically through approval, fulfillment, invoicing, and reporting without manual handoffs between systems. When evaluating platforms, the key question is not what each module does in isolation — it is how cleanly the modules connect to each other.
