Part 6. NEW MODELS & THE NEXT INNOVATION WAVE

The Data Story: Buyer Innovation Appetite Muted for Majority; Pursued by Minority 

Managed travel isn’t always at the forefront of technology innovation. It’s a complex proposition to balance the preferences of a business traveler with the protocols and cost optimization required by their employer. Additionally, travel buyers aren’t always looking at travel technology opportunities directly. According to BTN data, travel buyers’ tech experience and tech stack is mediated largely by their travel management companies. If this trend holds true—as it has for many years—TMCs will need to innovate before we see large-scale movement across travel programs toward new or upgraded technologies.

The yellow bar sections in the chart below show what percentage of surveyed companies for BTN’s State of the Industry Report sourced several categories of technologies from their designated TMC partners. The light blue bars show what percentage was sourced directly from the technology providers. Dark blue indicates percentage of buyers not using tech from the various categories. More than half of companies source online booking tools, profile management systems and mobile apps through their TMCs. These are major drivers of business travelers’ digital experience.

There is a lot of TMC investment toward innovation happening now—much of it around artificial intelligence, but not all. Some TMCs continue to develop their own technologies, while others will purchase or partner to achieve roadmap milestones. The consensus among industry observers is that innovation—whether developed internally within the TMC or externally for them—is happening more quickly than ever, thanks to the support of AI in developing more AI technologies.

Where those capabilities have been applied first has been interesting to watch. While the industry is hearing a lot about chatbots and AI-driven travel assistants, fewer of those big-swing agentic technologies have delivered huge value to the business traveler as yet, even though several tech companies and TMCs have articulated the vision, made investments and are developing quickly. We’ve seen more products and upgrades geared toward automating internal repetitive tasks for travel and expensing, routing known travelers and deploying AI as a first line of response for basic traveler inquiries. More powerful data analytics have also been a natural fit for a layer of artificial intelligence.

This will be a critical development in the TMC space as buyers rely heavily on their agencies for data reporting. Indeed, agencies are the most used data source across all buyers surveyed, though a good majority of travel buyers also subscribe to payment, expense and supplier data to inform their programs. Ultimately, the application of AI on corporate travel data sets will go beyond the idea of reporting and into predictive analysis that delivers recommendations. Some providers have begun to surface program optimization options based on AI data analysis and automating changes to policies and program settings if the options are approved.

Whether applying AI innovations for traveler servicing, supplier sourcing or surfacing novel program strategies, new tools will need to build trust among the travel manager set. Asked whether they trust AI to serve their travel programs, travel buyers rated their trust at a “meh” 3.02 on a scale of 1 to 5. Looking deeper into that average, however, slightly more than a quarter of respondents on the top two rungs of the AI trust ladder. Twenty-one percent were feeling wary or were not interested at all in AI developments. Slightly more than 50 percent sat expectantly in the middle, with lingering questions around accuracy and effectiveness of AI solutions.

Even so, one-third of travel managers said they were exploring AI options for their travel programs.   

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The Intelligence Report

Technology permeates almost every aspect of managed travel. From traveler profiles to online booking tools, mobile travel apps and automated expense reporting, today’s business travel solutions have moved well beyond the era of printed tickets and lengthy phone calls with agents… or have they? Recent advances in generative AI, blockchain technology and sovereign identity have created a green field for innovation within managed travel, but can these new capabilities be harnessed?

“I remember the inception of online booking tools [in the late ‘90s]. It was groundbreaking in the day” said a global travel, meetings and events leader from the professional services sector. “Unfortunately, they’ve not changed much since. They're not agile.”

Agility, it seems, is what the business travel industry is in need of most. Despite the emergence of new technologies that support open architecture in the travel ecosystem and allow for greater flexibility and personalization, most travel buyers rely on traditional partnerships with legacy players to provide their tech stack.

So how and from which part of the ecosystem will that agility break through—and what’s been stopping it?

More than half of travel managers responding to the BTN State of the Industry survey cited their TMCs as the source for their online booking tool, mobile app and their traveler profile technology—all of which form a backbone of the managed travel ecosystem. Expense technology was largely sourced separately, but often that would be handled by the finance team and not by travel.

Resourcing is a particular hurdle for travel managers, who according to an industry consultant and former travel buyer, are working with diminished teams.

“Over the last few years, [corporate] travel teams have gotten smaller and they haven't got as much time to handle multiple contracts. So, if there's an opportunity to get tech through a TMC, they will take it,” they explained. Plus, it’s “easier” for most corporates to simply increase budget with an incumbent for an added service rather than presenting a whole new business case to secure additional budget to integrate a new tech supplier.

While some industry observers called buyers “too passive” and faulted them for “not asking the right questions” in order to achieve real innovation, buyers themselves voiced the desire to drive more progress and ideas around what it would take to achieve it. What they lacked was corporate support.

First Movers Find the Will, the Skill and the Bill

Few travel buyers have a mandate from within their companies to pursue true innovation around travel management models, and it’s a rare travel manager who also has an incentive structure to match the effort required to innovate in the space.

The exceptions, however, often are found within professional services and technology companies. Both are highly competitive industries that compete for talent and whose businesses rely on being able to stay on the leading edge of the technology systems required to run enterprises. Not only do they need these to equip their own workplace and heavily used travel programs, but they also have a stake in providing, advising and installing such systems into their client organizations.

As a result, the managed travel industry continues to see names like EY, PwC, Deloitte and ZS Associates, as well as enterprise technology companies like Microsoft, Salesforce and Oracle in industry headlines—either in building their own tools and integrations or actively working with new entrants and legacy players to develop new capabilities.

In perhaps the biggest move of late, PwC designed the Blockskye / Kayak for Business collaboration KayakBTX for their own needs; Deloitte has signed on to the same system and Blockskye continues to hire to develop the tools to their needs. ZS associates has signed on as a development partner for midsize player Direct Travel to help Steve Singh pursue his vision of “The Perfect Trip” via the Avenir product. To a certain extent, all these programs are willing to shape shift to fit the capabilities available now and will expand developments towards the future.

One of the most visible example of this has been the decision of both Deloitte and PwC to carve up their global programs to pursue innovation in regions where their partners were ready to collaborate on it. Both large consulting companies committed their U.S. programs to the innovation effort—Deloitte added its smaller Israel firm to their project—but sourcing a global partner for innovation was not a prerequisite. Even smaller ZS Associates is working with Direct Travel only in the North America market. It has other partners elsewhere. 

One travel management consulting firm CEO told BTN that more clients were going that direction.

“Do global companies need global scale in their TMC or tech? Whatever the solution—like, are they leading with that?” they asked. “The industry has spent years building up the globalization of programs, so that all happened. But we are now having conversations with clients where they’re saying, ‘Is it time to unpick global because I can then run faster with innovation.’ It’s a valid step forward if the infrastructure isn’t ready for you to switch across globally.”

For the vast majority of buyers BTN spoke to, the answer to the question about needing to maintain a globalized structure was ‘yes, we do.’ Whether that will evolve further is hard to say, but veteran travel managers at least for now do not seem to have a strong appetite to manage additional contracts, relationships and technologies.

“I love what Blockskye is doing; I love what Direct Travel is doing. I’m interested to see what Serko does with GetThere,” said one veteran travel buyer, who went with FCM as a global TMC partner in their company’s recent RFP process. “I can’t move with any of those suppliers because they really are not global; I can’t break up my program.”

Changing to a new entrant TMC is only one way to innovate with travel management, and plenty of travel buyers are looking at other ways to bridge program gaps and enhance the traveler experience without necessitating the foundational shift.

Positioning Artificial Intelligence as the Clear Path Ahead

The travel industry has worked with the concepts of machine learning and artificial intelligence for more than a decade. With the advent of generative AI and the lightning-fast development that has come with the prospect of having AI tools to support development of new AI tools, the industry is moving quickly.   

While one consultant cautioned travel managers not to fall for the “spin” and “AI washing” happening in the industry, most consultants and industry players were more positive on the capabilities artificial intelligence is already bringing to the table for travel management.

A big motivator on this front is the resource gap mentioned above—not only the resource gap within corporates for additional headcount and tools, but also the resource gaps still happening at some travel agencies that are viewing AI as a huge opportunity to boost productivity across the board, for agents, for account management and even on the consulting front with deeper insights into data.

As of February, however, when BTN’s State of the Industry survey was in the field, only one-third of travel buyers surveyed were actively deploying artificial intelligence-powered tools to support their programs—at least knowingly. It’s not clear how aware some buyers might have been about how their suppliers had integrated AI into the products they employed or how much suppliers have promoted AI-powered changes they are making to their tools and services in ways that don’t directly touch travelers and travel managers.  

While attitudes are changing quickly, in February the majority of travel program managers surveyed rated their comfort levels with suppliers of any kind using AI to serve their programs at 3 or less on an ascending scale of 1 to 5.

Qualitative survey data indicates that most corporate buyers are “still learning” about AI or are “waiting” to see further use cases. Many remain “unsure” about the potential benefits of AI or believe the technology is “still too new” to be reliable.

In response to such hesitations, one data analytics company CEO responded: “People's ultimate fear of starting is perhaps the most fundamental barrier. Misunderstanding the speed of adoption and the areas of quick wins is a significant barrier. Many companies overestimate implementation timelines while underestimating potential returns, creating unnecessary hesitation.”

AI Applications—More Robust & Building Trust

A quarter of travel buyers said they were “comfortable” or “very comfortable” with AI-enhanced services, and the industry is engaging with it in a number of ways:

Internal Travel Program Chatbots—Several BTN Corporate Travel 100 buyers have been working on internal chatbot tools that go well beyond the old “call and response” platforms programmed prior to the pandemic. Rather, such tools now are mining unstructured information in travel policy and travel intranets to find answers to questions asked in natural language. In addition to providing answers, they in many cases are also pointing users to the chapter and verse of the policy or other resource where bots have located and interpreted the information.

That style of fact checking and surfacing information sources is a key factor in gaining trust in AI for travel managers—and, for that matter, anyone.

Describing how his company developed and stress tested its latest AI analytics platform, one Germany-based chief product officer put it this way:

“The last [step] and one that's most important, we call this chain-of-thought transparency. That means you basically have the AI model layout. What is the data source? What is the data's time span you look at? What insight do you derive out of this and why do you come to this conclusion?”

It’s this type of transparency, they said, that allows users of AI to peer into what can feel like a black-box process and understand how AI tools are “thinking.”

CT100 travel buyers BTN spoke to said this was precisely how they were designing their chatbots now, though some still maintained partial hybrid call-and-response programming that worked well for them in a hybrid configuration with more advanced AI.

Data Analytics Platforms—Travel program analytics is among the most natural starting places for AI applications in travel, given the vast quantities of data travel managers are asked to aggregate and understand. A number of data providers, including TMCs, travel booking and expense tools and certain category management specialists, have made recent announcements about AI-enhanced analytics platforms.

The tools are doing more than supplying natural language interfaces to facilitate data mining. The industry is more broadly moving into a world of predictive analytics models and optimization recommendations that, depending upon the depth of integration with the provider—a TMC, booking tool or other solutions provider—an approval or two can cascade policy and other programmatic changes throughout a tech stack to realize the optimization.

That’s not quite into the realm of what has become known as Agentic AI—where users trust the tools to make program decisions on their behalf. As users see evidence, however, that AI can surface effective recommendations with traceable data, removing that approval process is the next step on the horizon. As travel managers lean more into those types of tools with their providers, the value of the provider to their program also increases.

That fact cuts both ways.

“Data is the key to everything now,” said one industry tech entrepreneur and CEO. “Once upon time data was for reporting, but today, in an AI world, it gives you insights and once you have insights you can build predictive models.”

This is a critical point, the tech CEO added, because when travel managers begin to peel back the different layers of data that make up their program, they often realize they don’t have full access to—nor control over—the data they need for predictive analysis.

That’s the key reason some sophisticated programs prefer to customize with third-party data analytics system providers that can integrate travel, expense, payment and supplier data, sustainability data, off-channel booking data and even market data that will produce better models and insights.

“Data ownership doesn’t mean isolation,” the tech CEO said. “It means collaboration between the traveler, the company, and the suppliers that support them.”

Co-pilots & Assistants—Artificial intelligence enhanced agent desktops, booking tools, and by extension mobile app itinerary and disruption managers, were among the first generation of machine learning-enabled applications to capture the industry’s imagination, and were rolled out prior to the pandemic. Today’s more powerful AI has advanced those opportunities.   

For the agency, AI-powered force multipliers are boosting productivity levels and closing some gaps to customer service as AI tools quickly surface trip options, waivers or other critical information while the agent concentrates on customer service. Conversely, for routine tasks, allowing AI to resolve an issue entirely frees agents to address complex problems or VIP clients.

For travelers, having a mobile AI-powered assistant in their pocket that understands natural language and that knows their personal travel profile, their company’s travel policies and preferred suppliers and can marry those worlds into a recommendation and booking engine has been something of a holy grail for business travel management. The industry is closer to this possibility than ever, and prototypes exist, though they are not perfect.

All-in-one TMC/Booking Tool providers have been among the first serious players in this market. Navan launched Ava in 2023 to serve as a traveler’s co-pilot. AmexGBT just enhanced its traveler-facing AI assistant for Egencia. GBT claims it can resolve about 30 percent of inquiries without human intervention. Steve Singh’s investment in Otto an AI travel assistant created by former Egencia executive Michael Gulmann is targeted mainly to the unmanaged business travel market—i.e. limited travel policy interference—but can recommend options and divert to Spotnana to book itineraries.

Booking tools themselves also are in the AI travel assistant game. Serko launched Zena in 2019 and enhanced the large language model foundation with more AI in 2024. Travel booking giant Concur has not developed its own co-pilot, but at least one buyer has told BTN they are working on a Skylink overlay of their company’s Concur booking tool instance, which is sourced directly from Concur and not through the agency.

Skylink is an AI-native start up and an interesting case study in that it’s a standalone app that bridges travel booking tools with enterprise collaboration systems like Slack and Teams. It interfaces with the user in the collaboration environment to respond to prompts, understand their personal preferences over time as well as company policy to return compliant booking options to the user. It can run approvals to the associated approver and then send the booking through the booking tool—all without the traveler ever touching a traditional booking interface.

Skylink itself has direct connects to airlines as well as connections to the GDS. One judge at the BTN Innovate conference in late 2024 where Skylink won first prize—suggested that technology like it would obviate the need for booking tool displays altogether as personalization and satisfaction rates drove trust through the user community.

Indeed, as such technologies become more sophisticated and more heavily used they will accumulate the user data and travel patterns, integrate into the user’s business calendar and open up possibilities for Agentic AI to take over certain tasks.

The Future Is Now?

Warning labels that come with AI use are plentiful—and above all, travel managers must ensure that their company’s own travel data stays within a proprietary sandbox. In order to be truly useful, however, data has to be shared, and at the end of the day each trip is connected to a traveler and becomes part of their personal travel history.

A handful of companies have come to the conclusion that while the corporate may own that data in aggregate—and perhaps the TMC owns a that data on more macro level across their own business—there is an important level at which the individual traveler is the owner of that data and should be the one releasing permissions and access to interested parties along the travel supply chain.

Without that aggregated view of the traveler, each traveler likely has a profile at the TMC, loyalty profiles with a number of disparate suppliers and possibly another profile with a booking tool. The picture of that traveler becomes fragmented. Gathering that picture back together, for some in the industry, is the key to unlocking true personalization and an individualized approach to corporate travel.

One professional services company buyer said their firm was currently building a tech stack “that will be based on the type of traveler that we actually need to support.” This includes potentially unravelling a globally consolidated program to push travelers “to some different platforms” and “segmenting” the program based on traveler needs.

They believe the convergence of data ownership and AI insights combined with increased content fragmentation, suppliers seeking a direct relationship with corporate travelers (often via loyalty programs) and the onset of AI agents will ultimately render the TMC superfluous. “We’re already figuring out what that needs to look like because we see it happening,” they said.

That’s a far cry from how most corporates are configuring their travel programs today, and likely not what most corporates envision for their future. But as a potential new model—even for a global company—it’s a concept that’s out there.

“You can’t just sit back and wait for an industry to get ready. You need to make the industry ready… we actually have to push the industry to advance because it needs to. Otherwise, how are we going to attract new talent?” they added. “We've got to create different opportunities in this industry because if we don't, goodness knows where we'll be in the next five years. Programs will just dissipate, and it will be like the Wild West. It's on all of us to drive innovation.”