It has been a busy few years for mergers and acquisitions in the travel management company sector.
In 2016, Clarity merged with Portman Travel while Wings bought Grosvenor Travel Management.
The following year saw US agency Travel and Transport buy Statesman Travel while Capita Travel and Events added NYS Corporate to the long list of acquisitions it has made in previous years.
Travel Leaders Group had a busy year, purchasing luxury specialist Colletts Travel in February before merging with ALTOUR International in the summer.
2018 began with a bang when American Express Global Business Travel announced it was to acquire HRG.
Shortly afterwards, Reed and Mackay acquired Hillgate Travel.
The reshuffling of the sector continued this week. Gray Dawes has announced that it has acquired Giles Travel, continuing a streak that began in 2015 with the acquisition of Travel Focus. In 2016, it added Travel Management Group and Cambridge Business Travel to its growing portfolio. Redhill-based CTM joined the group in late 2017.
It appears that the streak is not over yet.
Suzanne Horner, Gray Dawes' CEO, said, "This is an exciting period for Gray Dawes, our employees and loyal clients. Our company has grown rapidly through organic sales and acquisition; this latest chapter in our development is the jewel in the crown to a highly successful 2018. That is not to say, however, that it is our final acquisition of the year!"
The deal means that the group's turnover is now more than £150 million.
What is interesting to note is that the consolidation in the TMC sector is not happening in one specific part of the industry: it is affecting the megas, the local specialists, the TMCs focused on particular sectors, everyone.
It is as if everyone has decided that bigger is definitely better.
Driving this for many years has been the move away from agencies being remunerated by suppliers to being paid, increasingly on a transaction basis, by corporate clients.
Yet the world of business travel is like the world of music: when we moved away from physical discs, whether of vinyl or laser-engraved plastic, to streaming, music lovers decided they did not want to pay as much. The same is true in corporate travel.
The music industry has been saved by live music: you only have to see Glastonbury tickets costing £248 selling out in half an hour to see that.
What is business travel's equivalent? It is what happens when things go wrong on a business trip. That is when the TMC can show its value.
Yet those moments are fleeting. Many TMCs see the answer to the problem as size — getting higher volumes of low-value transactions.
With their margins being nibbled away further by changes such as the rise of NDC, many TMC owners are clearly deciding it is time to cash in instead.