Hubert Joly at his press briefing in Minneapolis last week mused that it was not so long ago that the future of agents was apparently in doubt.
The president and ceo of Carlson Wagonlit Travel said: "Three years ago people were asking if there was a role for the travel agents and did they have a future. Now there is no doubt about that. This is a growing business."
Predicting the death of travel management companies had become something of a sport in the business – well perhaps not so much among the agents themselves. What value did they give? With the growth of the Internet, online booking sites and self booking tools why did corporates need them? These were perfectly legitimate questions.
Just a couple of months ago, Jan Tucker Jones, BT's travel manager, speaking in a seminar at the Business Travel Show in London, said she would never use an agent to book a flight on a low cost carrier.
She is by no means the only one who does not see employing an agent as the be all and end all of a travel policy.
Unsurprisingly when the need to save costs was utterly paramount, there were also reports that companies were asking consultants whether it was possible or even feasible to manage their travel without a TMC.
The standard TMC reply was that besides providing a variety of services, including the increasingly important one of security through tracking travellers, they could also save their clients money.
Research organisation Topaz International has with its latest study provided significant information that this is very much the case.
Topaz found that in 2006, trips booked by agencies averaged $75 less than those booked on public internet sites. This was the largest difference since 2002.
The research compared fares for itineraries booked by TMCs to those available on public sites. These included fares from Orbitz, Expedia and Travelocity as well as direct airline sites.
Topaz found that in 94% of the cases, in 2006, the agencies were fares were either lower or equal to the publicly available ones. This was the highest figure for agencies since Topaz began this research in 2001 when the comparable figure was 93.3%.
The average agency fare in 2006 was $508 compared to those of $583 from the public sites.
The figure for the difference has varied over the years but generally it has narrowed. In 2001 it was $171, and in 2002 it was $154.
But since falling to $69 in 2003 and then to $56 in 2005, it has now climbed again to $75.
On air spend, still the highest item in most corporate travel budgets, agencies again scored highly. Topaz asked the question were corporate/airline deals were the factor which gave the TMCs the advantage.
For companies which spent $20m or less, agencies secured the lowest or equal lowest fare in 95% of the cases. For those with a spend of between $20m and $99m, the figure was 90% and for those with a spend of more than $100m, it was 96%.
But the difference in fares told a slightly different story. Those with the $20m or less spend had average fares of $436 from the agency and $473 from the online sites, a difference of $37.
Those with the medium spend, the respective figures were $667 and $820, a difference of $153 and for corporates with the highest spend $556 and $663, a difference of $107.
In the previous three years, corporates overwhelmingly offered the lower fares. But again the differences varied.
In 2005, the respective differences were $56, $48 and $73 while in 2004 they had jumped to $73, $64 and $151.
Bradley Seitz, president and ceo of Topaz, said: "The five years of comparative airline purchasing patterns indicates that the online alternatives are not always cheaper, but in fact are higher than the past few years.
"The game of distribution continues to be fragmented and a great cause for headaches all over the world. Full content is not full content, availability is not consistent, and as I have said in the past, the overriding desire of the airlines is to control and price their product where they can obtain the most value.
"The challenge of every corporate travel leader will be to ensure that they have processes in place to locate and book the lowest alternatives, and validate that their service
providers are giving the levels of contracted offerings that have been agreed to.
"What travel management companies have done, and proven here, is that they continue to show value to those that use them in both price and in service."
* see BTE's recruitment site www.businesstraveljobs.com