Out-of-programme bookings have become a mainstay for corporate travel, according to some in the industry. Travel managers hear about it from travellers via the dreaded phrase: "I found it cheaper." And why not?
"It's about content fragmentation, content all over the place," Hickory Global Partners president and managing partner Chris Dane said. That content can be product bundles themselves or just fares, but it’s all content that can go missing in corporate tools.
"It's not just air, it's hotel as well," Areka SVP of North America Charles Bacharach said. "We saw hotel go first in terms of the distribution strategy – what was in channel, what was out – and the airlines have taken a great page in replicating that. It's around control of the [end] buyer and what they see and how they want to merchandise to the buyer, which may sometimes be in conflict with what the travel manager [and] the corporate wants to do. So, it's a bit of tug of war between who controls the relationship with the ultimate purchaser within a corporate environment, which is the traveller."
The increase in New Distribution Capability fares is one contributor to the problem, particularly if a programme or its travel management company hasn't turned on NDC yet. Another is how the online booking tool is configured.
"Maybe it's adjusting your travel policy, maybe it's adjusting the filtering that you're doing in terms of how the OBT is configured, to be able to widen the aperture to show more that could be there and available in the corporate channel," Dane said. "It could be choking that off and the content's not surfacing early enough in the search results."
"And loyalty points are a great influencer," Bacharach noted.
But travellers wanting to maximise points isn't new. What is new are the added benefits and perks some suppliers offer loyalty members – especially those carrying branded credit cards – as suppliers keep pushing for direct bookings. For example, United Airlines in November 2023 boosted the number of loyalty points awarded for card spending, then in April 2026, began offering MileagePlus loyalty programme credit cardholders additional miles and "exclusive flight discounts" than for individuals who did not use a United card. On 1 January 2027, they’ll up that ante again for eligible card holders with a 5 per cent bonus toward their status.
"You still get your points as you would get through the corporate channel … [but suppliers] will give you more points if you're coming direct, which is the incentive they're willing to invest in in order to reduce the distribution cost," Bacharach added.
At the time of United's February announcement, the carrier noted that business travellers who are the primary cardholder of a United credit card still will receive the higher cardmember accrual rate when travel is booked using a corporate card by including their loyalty number in their reservation. But how many travellers are aware of that?
If a programme is not with a TMC that already focuses on direct connects, like Navan or Blockskye, some buyers have turned to technology suppliers who can capture these off-channel bookings. Players in this field include TripLink, Traverse, Traxo and the new Altimeter from Cruising Altitude. BTN spoke with three travel managers to see how they wrangle direct bookings and how they are helping these tool providers to expand their services.
Stanford University
Stanford University operations manager of travel and business expense Yvonne Fenton launched Traverse, owned by Airlines Reporting Corp., in her travel programme about two years ago for two reasons she said: A large population of the school's travellers preferred booking direct, and she wanted to help build out Traverse's technology to have access to reporting on those who did.
"We wanted to be able to include our customer data fields," Fenton said. "We wanted to be able to create unused ticket reports and have that dashboard and visibility."
Stanford's travellers can connect to Traverse through Stanford Travel Connect, a white-labelled dashboard, via a single sign-on authentication, Fenton said. They're then able to see all the airlines to which they can link their loyalty accounts.
"Once they do that, the link is instantaneous," Fenton said, adding that now they can go to a connected airline's website and choose whether it's for business or leisure. If business, "that automatically applies all of our discounts during the booking flow. Once they check out and purchase their ticket, it makes sure that the reservation is sent to our duty of care provider, Crisis24. … The beauty of it is that they only have to link to the [Stanford] portal one time, unless they want to link another airline."
Prior to adding Traverse, Stanford used United Corporate Direct. United also happened to be Traverse's first airline partner, but Fenton worked with Traverse to get other airlines on board. By the time she had Traverse up and running, she helped the technology company add American Airlines, Delta Air Lines and Alaska Airlines, carriers the university regularly uses.
Traverse had been in conversations with the carriers, "but we worked with our contacts at each of those airlines to help move those conversations forward," Fenton said. She will evaluate adding Traverse's international carriers to the programme "once reporting performance meets our quality and scalability criteria".
As for the enhanced reporting, Fenton has worked with Traverse to add custom data fields, so she can report out on budget unit and department and affiliation, "all the things that our key stakeholders like to hear about," she said. Getting unused tickets into the dashboard still is "a work in progress". In the meantime, Fenton can go to the business dashboard for some of her carriers and use that "as a workaround for now. But the goal is to get it all pulled into this one central dashboard".
Fenton also set up an HR data feed with Traverse that runs daily to see if users are still active Stanford faculty, staff or students. If not, it automatically delinks their accounts, she said, eliminating the need to manually track that. "That's what we had to do when we only had United Corporate Direct," she said. "We did find there were people who left the university but were able to continue using the discounts. … The data feed ensures that doesn't happen."
Stanford also uses Egencia as a more traditional TMC and a smaller TMC for very high-profile travellers. Egencia provides a data feed to Oracle, the program's expense system, that then allows travellers to enter their ticket number and pre-populate certain fields when doing their expenses. Fenton wanted to replicate this offering across all booking channels and is working to get Traverse to provide this, too.
"We are continuing to scope it out, price it out, and I would say that we are optimistic for calendar year [20]27," she said.
Fenton also recently completed a pilot with United for Business through Traverse in which for certain markets travellers have access to different bundles that the travel programme customises, "whether its Economy Plus seating on international flights or other amenities such as United Club passes, they can easily pick them as a complimentary option in the checkout process," she said, noting that she can determine the routes, the travellers and which amenities are offered. "If they booked directly with United without enrolling in the programme, they wouldn’t have access to those benefits. So, it's a saving for the university."
Since adding Traverse, "the ROI has been huge," Fenton said. "When we went live with the initial airlines, we had approximately 3,500 faculty and staff enrolled in United Corporate Direct. … Not only has our United enrolment grown, but we have anywhere between 500 to 1,000 enrolled with each of the other airlines."
Fenton keeps monthly track of how many bookings are made through each of the school's booking channels, and "the direct bookings continue to increase month over month," she said, but they're not taking away from TMC bookings, where the volume is remaining consistent. "We see new travellers, unique travellers booking through the direct path that were never even using the programme."
ZS Associates
ZS Associates global meetings and travel manager Suzanne Boyan was an early adopter of third-party, direct-channel booking capture, having signed on Traxo back in 2017 after her CFO found a cheaper deal on an airline's website than what was in the OBT. Instead of having her work with the travel agency to pull the data so that he could book with the TMC, which is what Boyan offered, he said he preferred to book it on the direct channel. "Oh, interesting," Boyan recalled. "That's a harder problem to solve."
TripLink from SAP Concur existed at that time, but ZS was not a customer of Concur Expense, so the company couldn't use that solution. At a Global Business Travel Association convention, Boyan and her boss at the time found Traxo, which was starting a pilot with United. ZS became a tester.
"It also helped solve our direct booking for hotel problem because we're a consulting firm, and we are not a big consulting firm, especially in 2017," Boyan said. "We couldn't negotiate rates as good as our clients could … so we use their hotel rates. … We can't put that into our tool, so we still needed to be able to be covered for duty of care. And Traxo solved that with their filter product. We got to see the data."
Boyan started a beta group with 25 employees, including her CFO. "That became 50 because word got out very quickly," she said. "They all recommended that we roll this out to the firm and we did."
Traxo works by capturing emails that include travel booking information. ZS programs the rules on its email server to say if they want to push it to Traxo if something comes from say a reservations email at a supplier. "Traxo then has the rules set up” because ZS has clients in the travel and hospitality space, and there’s no margin to make mistakes on capturing an email that isn’t intended for a travel purpose, Boyan said. "Traxo is not allowed to see those emails. Those are highly confidential. Traxo had to pass a very strict security audit. They couldn't have carte blanche to our emails."
The travel team and security team control the rules and review those quarterly to make sure that they are correct and safe, Boyan said.
But Traxo only had United enabled at the time, "and we were struggling to get other [carriers]" Boyan noted. In 2021 or 2022, Traverse – formerly NuTravel before a 2023 rebrand – approached ZS with its direct-capture solution. "Why would I need something that Traxo solves for?" Boyan said she asked, and Traverse replied, "Because we're owned by ARC, so all the airlines have a vested interest for us to succeed," Boyan recalled.
She took a gamble betting that more airlines besides United would join Traverse and moved air bookings over and kept Traxo strictly for hotel data aggregation, she said.
"The gamble paid off," Boyan acknowledged. "Traverse handles our direct booking enablement for all legacy carriers in the US plus Southwest, and now some hotels. Traxo we use for [most of] our hotel capture because even though we've grown since 2017, we are still under the same model where we want to be good stewards of our clients' money."
The travel department communicates to employees that they can go in and book direct if they want, provided they enable themselves on all the carrier and hotel chains that partner with the company's portal. "The airlines are happy because the only way to do that is through a reward number," Boyan said. "So, our adoption of rewards numbers is very, very high. And people are happy because it's the experience they want. Then for duty of care purposes, of course we connect to our duty of care provider."
Boyan also worked with Traxo on a custom solution for hotel room blocks that are managed through event and rooming lists. "We lose duty of care for that because it's not booked in our travel system, Direct Travel and Avenir, and we don't capture those through Cvent, so we've asked Traxo to build an Excel file upload where we then upload our rooming list," she said. "They then take that rooming list and shoot it off to International SOS. That has really increased the security of our programme and our people, and it's also been rolled out to other clients of theirs."
What's still missing? For Traverse, Boyan would like to add international carriers beyond what Traverse already offers. "We desperately need those," she said. "Our people are begging for international, specifically Canada, the UK, Germany and Switzerland."
Traverse did recently add Air Canada, but only for companies through the carrier's new Embarq programme for small and midsize enterprises. Boyan said they couldn't use it yet because ZS already has a discount, "but likely in the new year, they'll have a product that's viable for us," she said.
ITW
ITW director of global travel and expense Cathy Sharpe has long used Concur's TripLink to capture off-channel, direct-booking spend. The tool works by travellers linking their SAP Concur profile in the TripLink hub to their loyalty programme numbers with TripLink’s participating suppliers. They're then able to book directly on those supplier websites and have their plans and receipts automatically sync with Concur Travel & Expense.
But TripLink has some challenges. For Sharpe, one is that "individuals have to opt in," she said. "That's an issue." Another is that some supplier partners have left the tool over the years. Noted ones have included Air Canada and British Airways.
The latter "was a killer from our perspective, because there's been significant fare differentials between high [revenue] fares on BA – business class, premium economy type fares – a big differential between what we were getting through the GDS versus what we would be getting [from] BA direct," Sharpe said. "We've actually made a workaround."
That workaround involves a traveller forwarding their itinerary into Concur so that it becomes trackable. It then gets pushed to safety and security. "What we don't get from it, which we do get from other direct connects in TripLink, is the opportunity to aggregate unused tickets when they're using a carrier that is not in TripLink or we do not have a direct agreement with," she said. "It's a black hole if that ticket gets used or not."
During an interview with BTN at the recent Business Travel Show America, Concur Travel president Charlie Sultan, when asked if the company was still actively adding TripLink suppliers, said that "TripLink continues on. Candidly, I would say that some of the efforts that might have gone into TripLink have gone into AI lately. It's just to prioritise where to put resources and innovation. Some of those teams have been migrated to work on AI features, but the TripLink product continues. There's no plan to change anything."
A future solution for ITW could be Cruising Altitude's Altimeter tool, which is being developed and is scheduled for a pilot in early 2027. Sharpe and other travel buyers are on the advisory board. "We're looking to solve the fragmentation issue," she said. "We are definitely investing time in looking at additional opportunities to manage off-platform spend."
Fragmentation, again, is the driver. "Theoretically, if I have a corporate discount, and I go to that website and I see the ITW account, I should see the same in the GDS," Sharpe said. "I should see the same coming through my OBT, but then you still have discrepancy there. I like to think it's latency or some other reason, but I don't think that's all the reasons. Suppliers are not giving all the content to the GDSs. I believe that 100 per cent. There are GDSs that say they are getting it all. I'd have to see that in their contract because I don't believe it."
Sharpe also noted that even though TripLink or other supplier-direct options are investing in tools and capabilities that attempt to manage that spend, "I don't think all the gaps are closed in those areas. Cruising Altitude is attempting to do that," she said. "They're not going to be a booking platform. They're not going to replace the traditional TMC or anything else that you've got. [They want to be] a centralised capability to bring things together to measure, to apply safety and security, to manage different facets that are part of the travel buyer's core responsibilities to our organisations."
For example: being able to see unused tickets, credits, partial tickets, applying loyalty "and how that becomes relevant in your programme," the ability to engage directly with suppliers on all the data that's coming in, and doing fare comparisons. "There's going to be a lot of opportunity there," she said.
Despite the gaps in her current programme when it comes to tracking direct bookings, "I can't ignore the fact that there's significant dollars that would be lost if we were requiring everybody to go through the TMC channel," Sharpe said. "I don't even need to audit it because travellers do their own audit [with AI]. … Whatever the question is, you can get an answer quickly."
Sharpe also stressed that "as a travel buyer, there's no life I can imagine where I do not have a TMC partner that I'm working thoroughly with to manage a big facet of my programme," she said. "Can it be all there? I don't know. I haven't seen that yet. Cruising Altitude [might] fill that sizeable – and getting bigger by the moment – gap we all have."