TMC Content Opacity: Should Travel Managers Live with It?

It’s a question that has erupted at multiple events in recent months: Are travel management companies preferencing their own negotiated rates or even suppressing client-preferred content in online booking tools to return search results that are more advantageous to the agency than to the client?

A program manager may begin to suspect this when travelers complain about finding a better deal online, whether for the same flight or one available but not returned in the OBT. The more it happens, the more suspicions can take root into distrust as buyers unpack TMC economic models and understand that agencies make money from both sides of the buyer-supplier equation. They earn revenue from corporate clients, they earn revenue from suppliers including airlines, hotels and car rental companies, and they get incentives from global distribution systems. So, who is the TMC most beholden to?

Not all discrepancies are for commercial reasons. Some are due to technical limitations. And configurations can play a significant role. Still, frustration levels in some circles are on the rise. 

"The model is broken," Gilead Sciences global head of travel, meetings and events Steve Sitto said in December during a buyers' panel at The Beat Live. "We have all of this automation and intelligence coming in … and we'll end up with better data. But the blind spot is … the commercial model. It's tough because the airlines are paying the GDSs and the TMCs, and this one's paying that one. We are kind of left in the middle wondering what is going on, and why did they just shut off content for a specific airline. … Things like that start adding up. Then the suspicion is growing, and you end up with basically losing trust in the system and the suppliers."

"I can't be put in a position where I have to try to explain for my partners why I have a partner that's hiding content," said Oracle director of global travel sourcing and GPO Rita Visser, who moderated the panel. "This whole trust and transparency thing is huge."

Potential Problems

While this isn't a new issue—multiple sources said TMCs have been filtering content for years—it's one that some in the industry feel is accelerating.

"The more recent twist on this in terms of content availability started after Covid where, especially the airlines, but also hotels, they do it very subtly now," a former airline executive said. "And it's costing Corporate America probably on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars a year in terms of … additional spend above and beyond what the lowest fare would be if all content was available."

One current airline executive said their team receives 15 to 30 complaints a month from travel managers about missing content, and those complaints tend to be about expensive routes. 

"Most travelers, if they see a difference of $50 or $100 on a domestic route, they just don't care enough to email the travel manager," the exec said. "The complaints that come in tend to be when there's these huge price differences. It doesn't mean that's the only thing going on, but that's what gets escalated."

The airline executive explained that a buyer likely would contact their TMC account manager with the problem, but that manager might not have answers. 

"People at that level aren't told that this is the way the TMC makes money," the airline executive said, adding that the TMC account manager likely would be told internally a tale about the airline's availability was down or there was a problem with communication. "Then they go and they flip the switches so that magically the content shows up."

Not all TMCs usually behave this way, "but a lot of the times, we know who the TMCs are that do a lot of this, and we just kind of shrug our shoulders," the exec said.

In particular, "as you get up into the larger, more sophisticated [TMCs], that's where they really start doing more of the flight-by-flight and the stuff that's harder to pick apart where they're suppressing certain inventory and not consistently. That's where it gets really hard, and it's very opaque what's going on," the airline executive said.

How Can This Be Happening?

If a TMC owns the OBT software, it can bias the display to the traveler, CorpTravelTech consultant Steve Reynolds said. "When it's a third party, I can't do that unless I'm the administrator of the system—[in other words,] the company asked me to manage the OBT configuration for them." Reynolds said most TMCs are happy to serve as the administrator because they then have the ability to "play with the content." 

The other way for a TMC to adjust content is through its marketplace, he added. " 'I want you to connect to my marketplace, and I'm going to feed the content to you.' Why would they want to do that?” Reynolds asked, then answered his own question: “The only real rationale is that it's going to generate more revenue because I can bias to some extent the options that are fed to the OBT."

Some TMCs acknowledged there is some preferencing of their negotiated rates in instances when it will monetize certain opportunities. Every TMC that spoke to BTN, however, said their practices were transparent to the client.

"That's not a secret," Christopherson Business Travel chief operating officer Josh Cameron said. "We have different streams of revenue. But those are all public streams of revenue, and if we're utilizing those streams, our customers know. We're not doing anything to arbitrarily shift results to benefit only us. … We have so many competitors that are doing this that I think naturally the market becomes a little bit skeptical, which is probably a good thing to some degree, but it creates an uphill battle for us because we're not doing this."

"With both hotels and flights, we give companies the option to configure whatever they want," AmTrav by Perk CEO Jeff Klee said. "Where there are different options like client rates, TMC rates and airline promotional rates, there is a setting where clients can say their preferred rate should always be bumped to the top, even if lower rates might be available. 

"Where we try to promote preferred suppliers is at the account management level, not in the booking tool," Klee continued. "If we have a strong partnership with a supplier, when we're dealing with a travel buyer, we will play up all the benefits of that supplier and try to negotiate a great rate for them so that they would then make that supplier preferred and, therefore, have it bubble up to the top in the booking tool. That's a more sustainable way than burying or suppressing options because the worst thing we could hear is, 'I found this option on [a] website, and it's not in your booking tool.' We never want that to happen. It makes it look like we're not doing our job. And you can't really get away with it, not when there are so many comparison websites, including Google, that will give you every single option in milliseconds."

American Express Global Business Travel VP of marketplace, product and engineering John Bukowski echoed some of Klee’s sentiment. 

“Our core business is our marketplace. … If we are not showing the right content or if that content is not available in our marketplace, travelers will go into other marketplaces, and that is detrimental to our business,” Bukowski said, but added that GBT, for one, had “not seen an uptick” in content-related complaints or concerns from clients. 

"We need to convince customers that they should shop in our marketplace and that we have the best content,” Bukowski said. To do that, he added, GBT provides “at a minimum … whatever's on the public websites, so we have not seen a big gap in content, and we continue to help customers negotiate better deals."

Asked about OBT configuration, Bukowski said GBT "gets the feeds in from the GDSs for content, but the curation of that content is at the customer level that adheres to their policy, their preferred carriers and their preferred rates," regardless of whether the OBT is contracted directly with the tech supplier or through the agency, though contracting does impact which party configures the actual tool.

GBT in September announced a partnership with SAP Concur to develop a travel and expense management platform called Complete. The details of operational configuration of the new product remain in development, he said.  

"We are working with SAP to figure out how to streamline this," Bukowski said. "The general principle of the alliance is that it should not matter how customers actually buy Complete, it should be about the product Complete delivers and all the different benefits and perks and content and everything that comes with that. … We're trying to make it easier for customers to come into that regardless of how you actually contract for it."

BCD Travel declined to be interviewed for this report.

Reasons for Missing Content

There are multiple reasons why content might differ between an OBT and an airline website or show up further down on search results pages than a travel manager thinks it should, and some of those reasons are legitimate. 

"It's really important to distinguish between the technological content gaps and the commercial content gaps," Klee said. "One might be unavoidable in the short term based on connectivity choices. The other is very purposeful by the parties involved." 

What possible technical gaps could lead to missing airline content?

Occasionally a fare might be filed wrong, but that's unusual, according to the airline executive, and it's generally obvious when it happens. Technology also plays a role, particularly when routes are heavily trafficked or require connections. New Distribution Capability further complicates the issues with continuous pricing now offered. 

System caches working behind the scenes could personalize search returns but also could leave out content.

"In order for any content aggregator, not just the GDS, to handle all of the hits to the system, there are cache mechanisms being enabled," said Coforge chief officer of strategy and growth Erika Moore, adding that the number of combinations now allowed is far more complex than what the industry had with traditional schedules and pricing due to the introduction of NDC and continuous pricing. 

"Cache mechanisms ... drive historic learning. If you are a TMC servicing a particular buyer, because of your customer footprint, the cache has enabled certain patterns of search and behavior little by little that starts to become an almost biased component of the content that gets served. … That could lead to some consolidated patterns of full content not coming across and not because anyone is doing anything consciously malicious."

Andy Menkes, president of Fare Audit, which he bought last year,  added that search prompts themselves could make a difference in results. 

For one client, Menkes tested a flight search for the New York-London route, but the tools returned itineraries that connected in Chicago or Boston, even though United Airlines operates multiple direct flights from Newark. When he specified Newark in his search and a departure time of 11 a.m., the tool returned no flights at all.

The issue was the client's travel policy, not the tech. The policy was configured to check for flights within three hours before or after the requested departure time. That meant the tool looked for flights departing from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m., when there were none scheduled.

"That's why it offered connections," Menkes said. "That's an example of poor administrative configuration."

An airline also could have withdrawn certain content from the GDS, such as basic economy fares, which few managed travel programs use. Also, if a client or a TMC hasn't turned on NDC and an OBT shops only EDIFACT fares, then it won't show NDC-powered offers. Moore also noted that different types of TMCs sometimes have direct connections that enable different types of content, which could affect what gets displayed.

The last reason cited for fare discrepancies, and the one that the current airline executive believes is the reason for the "vast majority of missing content issues that are reported to us," is some type of agency sorting, filtering or content suppression. 

Further, the former airline executive noted that often these moves have been indirectly sanctioned by the client. In the executive's former role, when clients were notified that they weren’t meeting their volume share and were asked to change their display settings to meet their contracted share, some were hesitant to do so. 

“It was because the TMC gave them a really low transaction fee, but then the client had to allow the TMC to control the display," the executive said. "That's what most clients, even the largest clients, have in their contracts. … They would reluctantly tell us they didn’t have control over their displays.”

 __________________________________________________

Visit www.businesstravelnews.com tomorrow to read Part 2 of this report, or check your BTN Daily on Friday. It will give ideas about what to do if you think your TMC is tinkering with fare displays for your program. Some suggestions are radical. Some are common sense. Spoiler alert: None are perfect.