Articles tagged “tmcs”

Everyone in corporate travel is trying to cut out the middleman, which is awkward because half the people in corporate travel are the middleman. Hilton's gained traction with a new program for small- and medium-sized businesses and easier processes for payments.

American reintroduced its fares to the channels where travel agencies want to book them, and Isom acknowledged their absence was their biggest "pain point." The airline, too, will be feeling pain for some time.

Business travelers know their livelihoods may depend on getting out on the road to nurture relationships with clients. Bean counters, concerned about inflation and sustainability issues, may block those trips.

Erratic airfares will likely be a theme over the course of the year. The question is how damaging, reputationally speaking, will the settling down period be for American Airlines, compared to the financial gains — short or long term.

Second seasons often disappoint, but Steve Singh's comeback bodes well for blue-chip corporations. Singh is a business travel icon, and his ideas and energy may rev up the metabolism of travel managers, whether or not they buy into his new startup Spotnana.

The activist investor Maguire has raised fair points that Yatra has taken too long to hire a chief financial officer and to hold board elections. But otherwise, CEO Dhruv Shringi and the management team have led the company well.

American Express GBT's top boss Paul Abbott knows that having a distributed workforce can boost business travel spending. The travel management giant itself went 90 percent remote in the U.S. several years ago, and it saw its business travel expenses rise.

Over the years, the big global distribution systems have been a major barrier to innovation by airlines and travel startups, in particular. The European Commission now intends to take a serious look at this dynamic.

Expedia has been talking for a couple of years about being opportunistic when it comes to mergers and acquisitions for its Egencia business travel unit. That may be on the back burner for awhile, though, as the parent company, which has been bogged down in integrating acquisitions over the past couple of years, focuses on growing what it already has.