A significant proportion of Europe’s travel buyer population have a shared experience right now in that their chosen travel management company has either bought another TMC or has itself been bought in recent months. More can expect to join that list soon, with industry experts pronouncing the current TMC buying spree far from finished.
Buyers who find that their TMC has new ownership, or is newly enlarged, will inevitably review whether their travel needs can still be served at least as satisfactorily as under previous arrangements. Many will conclude all remains well. Others will not. “There are going to be a lot of RFPs in 2026,” says corporate travel strategic advisor Martin Warner.
Clive Wratten, chief executive of the Business Travel Association, which represents 30-plus TMCs in the UK, agrees. He adds that many clients were about to enter a new cycle of RFPs anyway as a previous round of client contracts signed post-Covid approach expiry.
A webinar presented by Goldspring Consulting in October reeled off a lengthy checklist for buyers to work through before deciding whether to go to review. Among them are post-acquisition changes to booking consultant teams and account managers, after-hours service, trip approval processes and performance against service level agreements; and data privacy, ownership, cross-border transfers and storage.
Less tangibly, and over a longer period, buyers will need to monitor the cultural fit with their TMC. Does the relationship still feel right for travellers and other key internal stakeholders?
Pricing arrangements could also change. “Maybe you’ve had the same pricing structure with your company for a long time; maybe the acquiring company has a different culture, a different approach, a different preference for how they do things to make their revenue,” said Goldspring senior consultant Jamie Meek. “Are you okay with that down the line when you have to renegotiate in this new environment? Be ready to have those conversations.”
These are timely questions because TMCs which have spent heavily on acquiring competitors could be reconsidering their client financing arrangements as they repay loans raised to fund their expansion. According to Pat McDonagh, CEO of travel management company Clarity, clients that pay TMCs on account may find this facility coming to an end.
“The cost of capital is definitely a factor,” says McDonagh. “TMCs are having to rewire the customer relationship a little bit. We’re not banks. We need to reset expectations in terms of credit terms, frequency of remittance and so on. The adoption of technologies like virtual card is a big part of unlocking some of that.”
The Goldspring webinar also addressed potential changes to the tech set-up between client and TMC. An acquiring TMC may try to steer the clients it has bought towards its proprietary technology or to preferred online booking tools and other partners.
TMCs also often have an important role administering a client’s booking tool. “Does that carry over now? Does it become a new cost item?” asked Meek.
Making matters even more complicated regarding technology is the new strategic partnership announced in October between the respective global TMC and booking and expense tool market leaders American Express Global Business Travel and SAP Concur.
The alliance means that exactly as buyers are reviewing their TMC relationship, “some TMCs will rethink their relationship with Concur given the new ‘top tier’ of offer from Concur which is exclusive to Amex GBT,” says Warner.
“The existing three tiers of Concur TMC partners all risk getting pushed down or delayed in accessing certain Concur features. They may look elsewhere and this could benefit the likes of [booking/expense tool provider] Serko, and perhaps more, smaller TMCs will reconsider [travel tech provider] Spotnana despite its common ownership with [the TMC] Direct ATPI.”
Airfare distribution turbulence
These changes in TMC/tech provider relationships come at a time when many buyers are already reviewing whether their TMC is accessing the best prices for air tickets. Airlines are channeling more and more fares exclusively through modern distribution pipes and away from those traditionally used by TMCs locked into complex technological and financial relationships with the global distribution systems that provide them.
Those reviews will now intensify, Warner believes. “Clients are starting to ask whether they are overpaying,” he says. “Where we've been used to distribution being standard, it's now so fragmented that each TMC is in a somewhat different position. I did a piece of work recently where we estimated that a US customer with 10,000 annual transactions may be overpaying by as much as US$600,000 depending on which TMC they're they're working with. Some TMCs hoped this issue would go away, and they've therefore been slow to modify their systems and processes.”
Warner continues: “Buyers risk not fully understanding the different emerging models of the TMCs and the technology they deploy. The overall cost of a travel programme is getting ever more difficult to measure. Choice of TMC and technology stack will vary the total programme cost as some TMCs are slower to offer unsurcharged or even full content.”
A destandardised marketplace creates more work for buyers trying to understand a significantly more complex landscape than a few years ago. But the upside of this transformation, says McDonagh, is that “they've never had more choice. I know that sounds counter-intuitive in a consolidating marketplace, but there's new technology, new opportunities to work with something different rather than the traditional off-the-shelf technologies that the corporate client has become used to.”
That is exactly how one seasoned travel manger, speaking on condition of anonymity, views the situation. “Next time we go to bid there will be companies included that I probably would not have looked at five years ago, including an independent contractor organisation and a niche player,” the buyer says.
“We're very, very far away from that old mentality of ‘I'm a big multinational company, therefore I have to partner with a big multinational TMC.’ That’s due to the fragmentation and the rapidly evolving technology that's out there,” they add.
Mike Bor, a non-executive group director of Gray Dawes Group, which has grown significantly in recent years through acquisition, also concludes that there is increasing choice for larger buyers after he compared BTN Europe’s list of the 50 largest TMCs in the UK for 2024 with that of 2010. During that period, sales at the number one TMC on the list, (American Express Global Business Travel in both cases), grew 90 per cent. For the number 25 player, sales were up only 31 per cent. But for the TMC ranked 15th, sales had rocketed by 280 per cent.
“Mid-sized is where you have the entrepreneurial, focused businesses which are growing more dramatically than the largest and smallest TMCs,” says Bor. “Before, global choice was limited to the three biggest, but now travel managers have the opportunity to work with more TMCs in that middle band that have set up wholly owned operations in key markets to give them a service hub.”
The BTA’s Wratten, meanwhile, argues that a new generation of TMCs are expanding the less mature end of the market. “We’re growing our membership,” he says. “There are a lot of businesses entering under the £15 million turnover mark and are seeing a real opportunity with clients with £500,000 to £3 million-£4 million spend that have not used a TMC before or have fallen out of love with some of the big boys. That’s positive because it’s generating growth from the back end. We’ve had four join in the past couple of months. We look at their books before they join and they all look healthy.”
Even after the recent rash of TMC acquisitions, it would appear, despite concerns initially expressed by the UK Competition and Markets Authority about Amex GBT buying major rival CWT, that there is plenty of choice. Now it’s up to buyers to do the due diligence on understanding what those options are.