Business Travel's Problem Was Never the TMC. It's the Technology They've Been Handed.
Travel management companies run corporate travel programs for thousands of businesses at once, and they do the hardest parts of that job brilliantly: service, judgment, and the relationships that hold a program together.
What hasn't kept up is the technology underneath them. TMCs are in the difficult position of delivering a great experience on tools built for a different era, and that gap has quietly made their businesses, and business travel overall, harder than they should be.
The world and the travel industry have changed fast, and customers expect more from their travel agents every day. TMCs are negotiating rates, enforcing safety and spend policies, and handling the moments that matter most, like rebooking a stranded traveler at 11pm, where no algorithm can replace the TMC’s judgment and a relationship. It's a service business, and a hard one to run well. TMCs have worked hard to adapt. Their tools haven't kept pace.
And the evidence says this is a software problem, not a service one. Nine in ten travel agencies operate with four or more separate booking systems, and more than half juggle seven or more, per a 2025 survey commissioned by Sabre. Only 13% of travel buyers say their booking tool supports self service changes and cancellations, the single most cited pain point in managed travel, per GBTA's 2025 research with Direct Travel, Spotnana, and TROOP. Just 12% have a consolidated view of their travel program from a single source, according to more recent GBTA research with Direct Travel, Spotnana, and Marriott. And nearly a third of corporate travel buyers are reevaluating their TMC this year, with dissatisfaction over technology, not service, the leading reason, according to GBTA's own polling. The agents are doing their jobs. The software is holding them back.
Most managed travel still runs on a short list of aging booking tools that few would say they enjoy using. Much of the recent energy in the category has gone into consolidation and scale, but scale layered on the same aging technology doesn't fix what travel agents wrestle with every day. The tools are the constraint, and they have been for years.
That is the part of the picture that has waited the longest for real investment: the technology TMCs and their travel agents rely on to do their jobs. That's the gap Engine is focused on closing.
For more than a decade, Engine has built travel technology for small and midsize businesses, a segment much of the industry once treated as too small to matter. Today 33,000 businesses use Engine, with booking times as fast as 2.5 minutes and no contracts, no hidden fees, and no minimum commitments in the way. Engine built that platform to run its own business, and it works. Now Engine is taking the technology and infrastructure behind it to build something new for managed travel. This isn't Engine.com opened up to TMCs and their clients. It's a new platform built specifically for travel agents, on the same foundation that powers Engine.
Engine's new online booking tool (OBT) is a modern booking layer designed from the ground up around how travel agents actually work, built to run alongside the GDS and back office infrastructure TMCs already depend on. Travel agents will move between every client from a single dashboard, each with its own history, policies, preferred suppliers, and reporting. Policy enforcement will work the way it's supposed to: compliant options surface automatically, approvals route instantly, and out of policy options never appear. And changes and modifications, the single biggest source of agent workload today, will happen inside a modern interface instead of the slow, manual steps that eat agent time now, freeing agents to focus on the clients and relationships that actually grow a TMC's business.
Engine is building this to be modern and intelligent at its core. The demand is unmistakable: 92% of travel buyers want predictive analytics for travel spend, 89% want automated disruption management and rebooking, and 83% want conversational booking, according to GBTA's most recent research. Yet 58% say AI has had little to no impact on their program so far. That gap between what buyers want and what their tools deliver is exactly where Engine is building. Intelligent personalization will help agents surface the right options faster for every client, and intelligent insights will help them manage more accounts at once without missing what matters, whether that's a client approaching a budget limit or a policy that needs attention.
This isn't a bet on replacing the travel agent or the TMC. It's a bet that the businesses closest to the traveler deserve technology built to the same standard as the best consumer products, without having to build it themselves. And it's bigger than any one company. When the technology finally catches up, everyone moves forward together: the corporate travel buyer, the traveler, the TMC, and the suppliers who make every trip possible. That's the investment we think this part of the industry has been waiting for.
Engine is building it now, and showing an early look at what it can do at the GBTA Convention in Chicago, August 3 through 5. Come find us at booth #2910 for a demonstration, and learn how Engine powers the future of travel.