Managed travel's innovation gap has a governance problem

Stepping back into the managed travel conversation after several years away has been a curious experience. The debates feel familiar and the language is largely the same. Yet beneath the surface, the landscape has shifted considerably, and the gap between where the industry is moving and how most buyers are equipped to navigate seems to have quietly widened.

The dominant narrative in the market still tends to frame supplier choices as a binary: established providers offer stability, reliability and global reach; challenger brands offer innovation, flexibility and modern technology. Buyers, the story goes, must choose which they value more.

Having observed from a distance, and now looking back in, that framing seems increasingly unfit for purpose.

The complexity that travel buyers are managing today is structurally different from what it was five or six years ago. NDC content distribution, which now accounts for more than one in five ARC-settled transactions (ARC, December 2025), has fragmented the air content landscape in ways that require buyers to actively understand and make decisions about distribution strategy in ways they simply did not before.

A 2025 Sabre-commissioned survey found that most travel agencies are now managing four or more content connections, with over 80 per cent saying they want unified access but few having achieved it.

Agentic AI is arriving at pace on top of that complexity, not instead of it. McKinsey research shows 38 per cent of travel companies are not yet using agentic AI at all, with only 2 per cent reporting it is widely deployed, yet the market pressure to adopt is accelerating.

Payment infrastructure, sustainability reporting, duty of care, servicing models and OBT capability are all simultaneously in motion. No single supplier leads across all of these categories.

This is not a criticism of the large players. Many continue to invest heavily and are well ahead of where they were pre-pandemic. It is simply an observation that the pace and breadth of change now exceeds what any single provider can absorb on a buyer's behalf.

The assumption that a trusted incumbent relationship removes the need for active programme management has become a risky one.

Nor is the answer to favour challengers by default. Newer entrants have driven meaningful progress in traveller experience, payments and technology, but operating a complex global programme on platforms that are still proving themselves at scale carries its own category of risk. Organisations managing thousands of travellers across multiple markets cannot treat their programme as a test environment.

The real problem is not which type of supplier to choose. It is that many travel programmes have not updated their governance model to match the environment they are now operating in.

Category strategies are often set during RFP cycles and then left largely undisturbed. Technology decisions are made once and reviewed infrequently. NDC readiness, AI integration, sustainability data quality: these are not set-and-forget questions in 2026. They require ongoing attention from people who understand the detail.

The buyers best positioned to navigate this are not those who have backed the right supplier. They are those who have built the internal clarity to make deliberate decisions across a more complex and fragmented landscape.

That means being specific about what each provider is genuinely best placed to deliver. It means understanding the servicing implications of distribution choices before signing, not after. It means bringing AI into programme strategy discussions, not just into traveller-facing tools. And it means accepting that the RFP cycle alone is no longer sufficient as a mechanism for keeping pace.

The binary debate between stability and innovation is a distraction from the more pressing question: does your governance model give you the visibility and capability to manage what managed travel has actually become?

For most programmes, the honest answer is that it probably needs updating.

Having stepped back into this industry after six years away, what strikes me most is not how much the debate has moved on. It is how much the underlying complexity has, and how few programmes have yet caught up with it.