What It Takes to be a TMC in 2023

Travel management companies are reporting significant recovery levels going into 2023—both in transaction volume and in overall revenue. The “megas” that publicly report earnings have notched recovery rates from about 75 percent to 90 percent, and are on pace to manage more business accounts in 2023. Small and midsize companies—often those that have not managed travel before—have become a big focus for an industry in which some larger corporates still lag behind on fully returning to pre-pandemic travel volumes. 

With finances on the upswing, TMCs are investing to improve their products, services and technology stacks. In this special editorial series, BTN explores how TMC strategies align with buyer expectations as corporate travel ramps up.

BTN contributor Lauren Arena writes about the ways travel agencies are investing in new talent—and the ongoing challenges of a tight labor market. But you’ll also read about how TMCs are innovating with technology, not just to fill agent talent gaps but also to drive more strategic, long-term personalization and service goals. 

ChatGPT has captured the imagination of some TMC leaders, with ideas about using the open-AI platform to train a new generation of corporate travel counselors. They are also looking at ways to integrate ChatGPT into TMC systems so it might pull traveler profile and corporate policy data and marry that together with supplier offerings, perhaps to assist travel advisors in delivering relevant choices or, eventually, to serve as a level-one travel booking assistant that could disrupt the corporate booking tool market… someday. Mark Frary dives into TMC tech priorities. 

Buyers told BTN those investments can’t come soon enough after a 2022 travel restart that was fraught with strains on the system. The strain wasn’t just from TMCs. Plenty of travel suppliers, particularly airlines, helped serve up travel chaos over the summer, fall and winter months. But TMCs are in the unique position of being expected to smooth over the seams of fragmented travel technologies and suppliers—and that proved a high bar in the post-pandemic environment. Executive editor Michael B. Baker weighs service against cost in the request for proposal process and analyzes the status of how TMCs want to transform their fee models to account for the services they provide .