TMC Content Opacity: Picking Through the Thicket

The first part of this series covered the growing sense of mistrust between buyers and their travel management agencies as a result of content gaps that have grown wider since New Distribution Capability content has increased. Fragmentation has challenged TMC revenue streams, many of which come from suppliers and global distribution system incentives. Some buyers suspect TMCs may be tinkering with content displays, preferencing agency-negotiated content or simply removing certain content to capitalize on growing complexity and rebuild revenue streams. Policy configurations, the growing use of AI and personalization tools each also can play a part, as can dumb search parameters. In this installment, BTN examines the mechanisms by which TMCs can preference or suppress content and what buyers can do to suss out the issues. Read Part 1 here. 

Major GDSs each have different products that allow agencies to adjust the content in their search results. Travelport's Content Optimizer "enables agencies to control what traditional air and NDC offers they do show and where they can appear in results," according to the company's website. Sabre on its website calls its Agency Retailer "simple to adjust the selling level of any fare and focus on the most valuable options. Agents can mark up fares, highlight optimal sales and suppress content." 

Sources said Amadeus also offers such a product. The company did not return requests for the name of that tool. However, Amadeus in 2025 noted it was piloting a product called the Unified Preferences Platform that would "allow travel sellers to prioritize or remove air and hotel content based on their strategic goals." 

Christopherson Business Travel chief operating officer Josh Cameron confirmed that GDSs have tools that allow for TMC revenue optimization, but "if you're a non-GDS carrier or a non-GDS TMC, meaning you've got direct channels, it's even darker," he said. "Nobody's building direct connects and building their own algorithm to sort and display content and spending millions of dollars on that effort without monetizing it. So yes, this is happening, and we run into this constantly."

CorpTravelTech consultant Steve Reynolds concurred, noting newer travel management entrants have more ability to alter content displays because they have developed integrated travel and expense platforms. Still, he added, they also have realized that a reliance on transaction fees isn't sufficient to compete with their larger traditional rivals. 

"What they realized pretty quickly is, you can't survive on fees," Reynolds said. "If I want to be competitive ... I've got to offer a fee that basically I'm going to either break even or lose money on, so the only way I can make money is on supplier incentives."

Why would an agency suppress certain content or place certain offers on the fifth or sixth page of a display when research has shown that most travelers make their choices from page-one results? A legitimate reason could be that a travel manager wants to push travelers to a certain airline in order to capture corporate volume commitments, and wants options from other carriers suppressed. More opaque reasons could be that an airline is paying the TMC for better "shelf space" in the search results to gain more volume or share, or that the TMC is pushing its own negotiated fares to page one because they earn a higher commission on them than the corporate negotiated rates. 

"In the absence of direction from the travel manager, the TMC can imply that they have free rein to configure the tool as they see fit," Fare Audit president Andy Menkes said.

You won't see this strategy often for domestic coach fares, but rather on fares where airline TMC incentives tend to be higher, typically for premium cabins and international routes, according to one airline executive who requested anonymity, citing in particular business-class flights to or through London. 

One travel buyer who asked to remain anonymous gave an example in which a traveler sought Chicago-London flights, and the search results showed only business-class options. That company's policy is that the traveler can book business class for any flight over six hours, but they don't have to. "How clever [for the TMC] to not say anything and maybe get a few that would slip through the cracks before somebody realized it and said, 'Wait a minute. Why aren't I seeing any coach class here?' " the buyer said.

Another example supplied by the airline executive also concerned a business-class ticket to London, a route in which carriers offer several price buckets, each ascending significantly in price.

"Our availability may be the same as our competitors, and we have essentially the same price out there," the executive said. "The agency is blocking our lowest open inventory class, and now suddenly we look like we're $2,000, $3,000 or $4,000 more than our competitor. Our flight shows up, but it shows up at a much higher price."

Still, these GDS tools and their usage are typically opaque to the buyer, and to find the trail of breadcrumbs back to the actual system settings would be difficult.

Pursuing Root Causes

One of the key steps a travel buyer can take to combat content discrepancies—whether purposefully manipulated by a TMC partner or not—is to conduct an independent audit.

The travel buyer who gave the London example "absolutely, 100 percent" can find discrepancies in airline direct content versus what is received through the online booking tool via their TMC. 

"We did an audit, and [the TMC] is well aware that we did the audit, and it didn't come out good," the buyer said. "We were losing on average $15,000 a week on three or four carriers in the U.S. where there were fare differentials. ... We are seeing lower fares on airline-dot-com sites versus our OBT/TMC. However, we are also seeing more TMC directly negotiated fares that sometimes beat our discounts and airline-direct offers."

Wait. If the fares are better than the corporate negotiated rates, then what's the problem?

The issue for the corporation is that they might not get credit for that volume because it would go to the TMC instead. That leads to business reporting meetings in which airlines could claim the corporate has booked less volume than the travel manager claims. A failure to meet volume targets could reduce the buyer's credibility and negotiating leverage. 

Fare Audit's Menkes suggested every agreement between corporate and a TMC should have a "right to audit" clause included. "The client [should have] the right to audit not only the TMC books and records, but [passenger name records] using an independent third-party audit firm that is not a competitor to the TMC," he said. Menkes added that a 'lowest airfare guarantee' clause also should be included, meaning roughly that the TMC guarantees to offer the lowest fare within policy as found in the GDS or the consumer-facing website. 

Asked about American Express Global Business Travel's support of independent audits, GBT VP of marketplace, product and engineering John Bukowski reiterated what he said in the first entry of this series: A TMC's marketplace must be competitive or it will lose business. 

"We are working with customers to make sure they have equal confidence in the top routes that they have and making sure that the right fares are there," he said. "Having a third party come in, we have to work through some of that stuff. We have published fares. Everyone can see published fares on supplier-dot-com, but customers have negotiated fares. GBT has negotiated fares. You have private content that's in our marketplace that we don't want to publish everywhere. So, through these negotiations we need to be mindful of that, but we think through the reporting we have, through transparency with customers, they will have confidence that they have the [best] marketplace that's out there and will have the best content, which delivers the most savings to them."

In addition, GBT CEO Paul Abbott at The Beat Live conference in December noted that making sure customers are confident in the content is "something that we are proactively wanting to tackle head-on. We're launching in Q1 some new services for our global multinational clients where we're offering a complete review of the content that is in our marketplace, and also the display and preferencing of that content." 

An audit isn’t the only action travel buyers can take if they aren't getting the content they think they should or if it isn't sufficiently prominent in search results. Buyers also could contact their carrier sales representatives if they believe content is missing or being de-prioritized by the agency. 

"If it's a serious issue or something they think is egregious, I would approach it from both ends, the TMC and the supplier, and see what they get back in terms of a response or explanation," AmTrav by Perk CEO Jeff Klee said. "Hopefully, the explanations they get would be the same from both sides, but if not, they should worry there's a bigger problem."

That bigger problem is anchored by suspicion, Klee said, with visibility the remedy. 

"Unfortunately, there is a serious lack of trust within the industry," Klee said. "Content gaps cause a lot of mistrust. Often there are legitimate reasons for those gaps. … But I think it's best for the long-term viability of our industry to move this conversation into the open so everyone understands why content is missing and what can be done to fix it."

Some corporations have created in-house Corporate Travel Departments accredited by Airlines Reporting Corp., in which incentives and commissions flow to the corporation. The popularity of the configuration has waned in recent years, but it's not necessarily difficult to establish. ARC offers a CTD number, and the corporation can work with their TMC to have that number used for bookings, and then the commissions go to the corporate. A corporate also could operate as a CTD without a TMC, but few do.

CTDs without enough air volume to get discounts that can match those TMCs could have their TMC use its ARC number for air bookings and the CTD's ARC number for hotel bookings. The corporate and the TMC then negotiate who gets what.

This is what Reynolds called a "hotel-only CTD," estimating 40 to 50 companies have established that configuration. The ARC number " is used when making the booking, either through the OBT or through the travel agent, and the hotel sends their commissions [to the corporation]," he said. 

However, Reynolds said some buyers have told him TMCs have indicated they would increase their fees if the buyer adopted that configuration. 

"I'm like, wait a minute. They're going to increase your fees, but they also promise that all that supplier incentive for hotels is going back to you?" Reynolds said. "How does that make sense? If they're giving it all to you, then your fee shouldn't change. It means they're keeping some of it. That just screams at me like there's something going on."

After All the Complaints, Is There a Good Case for Change?

EAB SVP for business solutions Steven Mandelbaum on a panel at The Beat Live suggested a different deal structure in which corporations would pay travel suppliers, including airlines, hotels and car rental firms, a net rate, stripped of any overrides, commissions and distribution incentives. The corporation then would pay those costs directly and transparently to the TMC and distribution channels. That structure, he said, ideally would eliminate the preferencing and content suppression by removing financial incentives.

"This isn't about taking away money from the TMC," Mandelbaum told BTN afterward. "I got asked during the presentation, 'Well, will you pay a TMC more to make up for it?' You have to." He argued that buyers often become "addicted" to low-fee or "free" TMC service without realizing they're still paying—just indirectly. "The way deals are structured, you're almost locked in, because everyone pays the tax on it," he said. "You have to change all of it.”

Mandelbaum added that some TMCs receive more commissions, rebates and overrides than others, but the cost is largely baked into fares and rates, so most buyers pay the same embedded tax either way, even if some TMCs capture more of it. 

His broader point was that "the money is moving in multiple directions," which he said "lends itself to everyone gaming the system" because there are financial incentives to operate the program a certain way. 

"If the TMCs weren't getting paid by the suppliers, there'd be no incentive to do this stuff," Mandelbaum said. "They'd purely be operating in the best interest of their corporate customers."

While this may sound like how a CTD operates, it isn't the same, sources said. For one, a CTD doesn't pay the override fees some hotels agree to pay the agencies. For another, CTDs don't deal with any distribution costs. 

Some sources said Mandelbaum's suggestion wasn't a realistic fix, but others said it would depend on how the financial flows would work. 

"An airline would never pay a company what they're paying to the TMC, because the TMC uses their aggregate volume to negotiate superior discounts or commissions that far exceed whatever an individual company can negotiate," a former airline executive said. "He's saying Corporate America is going to turn itself into a payment portal for the industry. I can guarantee you financial risk and accounting professionals would not put up with that for a second."

Klee agreed that "the money flow in our industry is crazy," he said. Moreover, "it’s a big constraint on technical progress. In many cases, suppliers don't pay TMCs directly for distributing their product, rather, they pay them indirectly via GDS kickbacks. In some cases, those kickbacks are the only source of revenue for a TMC from a particular supplier and, as a result, the TMC has a financial incentive to use technology that may or may not be the most capable or the most innovative. In a perfect world, suppliers would pay TMCs directly for the value they deliver, and then TMCs would pay whatever technology partners they choose to use to enable them to deliver that value.

"Of course, if we disrupt the model, it is definitely possible that buyers might be asked to pay more," Klee added. "But I would argue in the long run, they will be better off if airlines are not subsidizing payments to TMCs made by technology providers, which might influence a TMC to use technology that is less capable. There are a lot of inefficiencies with the way the money flows that I think if we were to fix it and make it a little bit more sensible, we would see much more rapid technological progress and innovation."

Gant Travel Management president and CEO Patrick Linnihan at The Beat Live, after hearing buyers complain about their TMCs, commented that they always have the option of changing suppliers, but that very few do. Case in point: The travel buyer whose audit showed discrepancies and losses of up to $15,000 per week is sticking with that TMC.

As Menkes put it, "A corporate travel manager has three choices: hope it goes away, but it's not going to; two, change the OBT if they're not getting content; or change the TMC," he said. "There is no fourth choice." 

The former airline executive agreed that buyers should "vote with their feet, but they haven't," they said. "Whether it's pricing, content, the advancement of technology, OBT development—all of it would progress if the threat of losing business was more prominent in the marketplace. There's no way Amex GBT and BCD and FCM and all these others can claim 90 percent-plus retention rates, which they all do, while simultaneously a majority of their buyers are claiming they're not happy with their current incumbent. There's no way those two numbers jibe unless you just have a very large percentage of buyers who don't want to drive a change management project within their companies."

Reynolds concurred that travel buyers don't often switch because the process is time-consuming, expensive and may not deliver the desired benefits. "There's no guarantee that the next one's not going to do it," he said. 

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The story doesn't end here. Stay tuned: BTN is working on a Part 3.