Companies are re-deploying their travel staff as they move increasingly towards outsourcing, Mary Ellen George, general manager of Advito, the consulting arm of BCD Travel, said.
Ms George said: "What we are seeing is more of a trend towards outsourcing. It is coming more and more into play with more and more requirements.
"It is not just airline negotiations but actual travel management. Companies are saying ‘We would like to outsource to you the management of our travel programme and have a service level agreement.'
"This is happening in both the US and the UK and the first movers are the multi-nationals."
Ms George was speaking to BTE at the Association of Corporate Travel Executives' global education conference in Barcelona.
She said there were now companies which wanted to cut staffing levels in their travel department.
"We don't think of it as travel being pushed aside. They are really saying we want people working in the risk management department on security rather than analysing RFP responses," she said.
Ms George said some of this stemmed from the greater involvement procurement departments now had in travel management. "They are asking more complex questions, more challenging question and TMCs don't necessarily have the answer," she said.
"It's a different mindset. They want more quantifiable data, more specific added value and you are required to quantify this."
Companies were now wanting to benchmark not only the performance of other companies in the same field but also other companies of the same size to see if they could adopt better practices.
She said Advito was launching a new travel management assessment tool by the end of the year which was "give customers a diagnostic about how they were performing against their peers."
Ms George said that as TMCs re-defined themselves, consulting was going to become more important to them and become a major earner for them.
She said her company had grown 20% this year and was increasing staff from 52 to70 by the end of the year. She said in 2007, it was set to grow by a further 40%.
* see BTE's recruitment site www.businesstraveljobs.com