The Conversation: September 2025

Welcome to BTN's monthly roundup of business travel and distribution and technology topics as shared on social media channels. In recent weeks, industry insiders discussed industry challenges, Lufthansa removing more EDIFACT content and the completion of Amex GBT's acquisition of CWT. 

Startups Chasing the Same Challenge

Are "startups" like TravelPerk, Ramp, Navan and Spotnana chasing the same challenge?  

AltexSoft president and CEO Alex Medovoi on LinkedIn thought so, and that challenge according to him is "how to make travel booking, expense management, and policy compliance truly seamless for corporations." He then asked what others thought is the biggest challenge in corporate travel today. 

"It's actually the next gen platforms that are around the corner with major backers / new entrants that will disrupt the industry unlike anything before," co-founder of Dataiera.com and Cardgeny.com Peter Marriott responded. "In fact even the modern platforms like TravelPerk have tech lockin and cannot in effect wipe away their traditional booking approach …. A nice UX wrapper cannot hide the fact they are also stuck in a legacy traditional mindset." 

Consultant and former CWT executive Martijn van der Voort replied that "Navan and TravelPerk should not be considered startups by now. They [have] been around for 10 years. We could argue they're legacy by now." 

Roman Blinov, senior business development manager at Emerging Travel Group, thinks the main challenge is that "all these top tools are essentially doing the same thing, duplicating functions and investing those same millions in developing similar or identical functionality."

"It seems to me that this only slows down the development of corporate travel tools, turning them into huge monsters, stuffed with everything at once. It is obvious that there are difficulties in maintaining and developing such complex solutions, where one functionality is tied to another. This generates excessive cost of maintenance of such products, and also slows down the speed of development, which ultimately affects the budgets of end users." 

Blinov further believes the industry should separate functionalities by core tasks and objectives—"travel component, business logic, expenses, and so on—a set of layers interconnected through integrations, but each with its own life cycle." 

Lufthansa Removing EDIFACT 

Garner CEO Cory Garner on LinkedIn said that "Lufthansa is playing a little bit of catch up relative to Singapore Airlines on systematically removing content from #GDS EDIFACT. Better late than never, but never late is better." 

"And it works well if you are big enough to avoid full-content agreements, build real NDC content, or connect directly with most OTAs and aggregators," replied Ignacio Rodriguez, Deputy CEO and CEO of distribution for Eurodistribution Hosting and Distribution Services.

"If not, your light fares, which give visibility to your product, should remain mostly everywhere. Large players can go head-to-head, while smaller ones must rely on guerrilla tactics," he continued. 

DataArt senior strategy advisor and T2Impact principal Timothy O'Neil-Dunne responded with "there is a problem that no one appears to want to address. Servicing is still not handled well by Offer/Order. Nor is data collection. Concentrating on EDIFACT is a symptom, not the cause."

"Airlines in their siloed mentality have not yet realized how much needs to get fixed with new processes, new tools and thus new ways to service these products. It irks me that the airlines did not realize how much extra work that the agents had to do in order to make things work in the GDS world. And no consideration for that effort in making things work was considered in part and in many cases in whole. The big question then becomes 'who pays' for this new capability. Answer 'not me.' And P.S., I still think SQ's implementation is amongst the best." 

Thoughts on the Amex GBT/CWT Deal Closure 

"For Amex GBT the challenge is now an opportunity: to modernize where CWT could not and prove that scale can be matched with vision," Martijn van der Voort wrote on LinkedIn. "For independent #TMCs: consolidation creates space to differentiate through agility and innovation. For procurement leaders and travel managers: sourcing must evolve beyond cost and toward future-fit value. You will need to look beyond. New players are emerging, technologies are advancing, and challengers are waiting just beneath the surface, they're here already. Find them. They are not hard to see if you are really willing to look." 

Inter-American Development Bank head of corporate travel Marco Guardia replied that "the TMCs that are willing to be flexible change and adapt to clients' needs and evolve together are the ones we will be looking for in the future. TMC[s] who put us in a box and expect to challenge clients to adopt will not share a path forward and stay behind!" 

Gary Hurst, CEO and founder of Mysa, added that "the people who carried CWT through such uncertainty deserve real recognition—resilience on that scale is remarkable."

"I completely agree that the future won't be defined by size but by the ability to innovate, adapt, and co-create with clients. Scale without modern, modular technology only magnifies the gaps," he also said.

"This feels like a turning point—not just for Amex GBT, but for the wider industry to rethink how value is delivered."