The long road to Emerald City

There is a particular kind of interest swirling around the managed business travel sector. The investment community is watching closely, trying to understand whether the industry is genuinely mid-transition or simply better at talking about change than delivering it. 

From the outside, the logic behind the current direction of travel seems easy to understand. Travel, expense, payments and data belong together. That is where the corporate authority, particularly in the global multinational segment, sits. It is where governance and control combine. In this world, scale matters in a way standalone tools struggle to match, which helps explain why large platforms attract intense scrutiny, and why alliances and acquisitions tend to be positioned as long-term structural plays. 

That logic mirrors how organisations actually operate and how finance leaders think about risk, compliance and spend. The destination itself is clear enough. What’s often glossed over is how tough the journey is to actually get there. 

The industry, for now, lives in an uncomfortable halfway house. Supplier economics still shape behaviour, even as the vocabulary shifts to “platforms” and “orchestration”. Many buyers still treat travel as a commodity while asking for stronger duty of care, cleaner data and a better traveller experience. Technology promises simplification but often adds another layer that still has to be implemented, maintained and paid for. 

The tension between ambition and delivery depends on scale, but it is felt just as acutely by mid-market, SME buyers and regional agencies who usually have to absorb complexity created by the bigger players. That makes change slower and more vulnerable than most tech roadmaps care to admit. Which helps explain why compelling stories are often told well before the work is finished. 

Building the Emerald City?

The Emerald City starts to take shape here. A place where booking, expense, payments and data dance in formation like the Munchkins. Compliance becomes more like a set of intelligent guardrails rather than a tornado of reminders. Insights matter as much as the transactions themselves. The yellow brick road is the narrative that leads there. It is persuasive and easy to present but it skips a number of difficult miles. 

Every transformation story eventually meets its Wicked Witch. In our industry, the witch is spin and idealism. It’s LinkedIn trolls and instant solutions. Launches designed to reassure investors and unsettle competitors. The idealism works for a while, but then you can’t escape reality. In reality, that means complex migration plans, operational friction and buyers applying pressure by asking simple questions: does it work? Can it be rolled out where I need it? Does it improve compliance without breaking my programme? Will it make my travellers happier?

Defending the Lion

The more interesting character, however, is the lion. 

The lion carries strength that the story rarely acknowledges. The managed travel sector sometimes looks coy about its own role. It gets drawn in by language that sounds sleeker, more modern and more valuable. Software. Platform. Fintech adjacent. AI led. These are labels that help with valuation stories but divert attention away from the craft that Tony Pilcher and his peers, the original travel managers, pioneered decades ago and which is still practised today. What is often missing is the courage to defend that craft openly. 

Orchestration at scale. Managing a type of complexity many organisations would, or do, prefer to ignore, while balancing commercial tensions between buyers and suppliers. Keeping programmes working in an uncertain world. Much of the work is unglamorous and even taken for granted. Or more bluntly: not paid for. As more processes are standardised, judgement, experience and pragmatic intervention become the premium. 

The irony is that the lion already has much of what Emerald City needs. Scale and reach. Deep operational knowledge. Customer relationships. Courage, it seems, is the missing ingredient. When that wavers, we see leaders pivot to language that weakens the sector’s connection to its roots. And the industry starts doubting the value of what it already delivers. 

Confidence to Drive Sustainable Change

Comparisons with Waiting for Godot become harder to ignore. The future always sits just a short distance ahead. Another roadmap or integration. Another press release about what comes next. Everyone prepares and waits, while at the same time the here and now keeps building momentum. Buyers keep parsing through the noise. Teams keep absorbing change and credibility ebbs away through small misses rather than dramatic failures. 

Integration, though, still deserves serious commitment. It also demands honesty about the work. Integrated finance, expense and travel arrive through products that work in unison, migrations that succeed at enterprise scale, and, to borrow slightly from Caroline Strachan, a steady rebuilding of trust. Organisations need time to adapt, and programmes need stability while change is introduced.  

The managed business travel sector should benefit from clarity about its own relevance, a better understanding of what actually creates customer value, and the confidence to work at the pace real organisations can sustain. Emerald City is reached on foot. The road there is as real as the effort required to get there. Are we prepared to go the distance without losing ourselves on the way?