Why TMCs are losing more than just bookings and what can be done about it.
In corporate travel, few things are as consistent as the debate around NDCs and as inconsistent as the awareness of hotel attachment.
Despite lodging representing the largest single cost category, accounting for over $500 billion globally each year, TMCs report that less than 37% of trips include a hotel booking made through their systems.
That’s not a small leak. That’s a black hole.
Doing the maths
To illustrate just how much revenue is slipping through the cracks, consider a TMC handling 2 million flight bookings a year:
- If each of those trips involved the average 2.5-night hotel stay at $184 per night, the potential hotel spend could exceed $920 million.
- Even under a conservative 5% commission structure, that would translate to $46 million in potential revenue per year for the TMC.
Now multiply that scenario across the global travel management landscape and the scale becomes hard to ignore.
Beyond commission: the wider cost
The economic impact of low hotel attachment doesn’t stop at missed revenue. Every booking made outside the programme reduces spend visibility, complicates data reconciliation and chips away at programme compliance.
Travellers are still booking hotels; they’re just not doing it through managed channels.
For corporations, that means less insight into where their people are staying and what they’re spending. For TMCs, it means incomplete reporting, lower value perception and higher pressure to prove ROI through other services.
What looks like traveller choice is often a symptom of a deeper system breakdown: gaps in content, integration and usability that quietly push people away from official tools.
So, what's at stake?
Left unaddressed, low hotel attachment becomes more than a commercial problem. It raises questions about the long-term strength of TMC-client relationships and the effectiveness of managed travel programmes.
The bigger the gap between traveller behaviour and programme capability, the more room there is for alternative platforms to step in and for corporates to start questioning the value of traditional travel management.
Rethinking the response
This challenge isn’t new. But the urgency to solve it is growing.
The solution doesn’t require a new toolset; it requires better integration. A more connected infrastructure. More complete content. And booking flows that meet travellers where they already are.
The TMCs that tackle this proactively will not only generate more revenue – they’ll strengthen key relationships, restore influence and deliver a better experience across the board.
HotelHub: building solutions to TMC problems
HotelHub was born when we saw the same pattern repeating: TMCs investing in tools that couldn’t talk to one another, clients asking for better visibility and consultants stitching together solutions with spreadsheets and good intentions…
They needed a practical fix. So, we built something different: a connector, not a competitor.
Powering hotel integrations for global TMCs around the world, HotelHub aggregates content from every major source: from GDS to OTAs and direct connects.
It doesn’t ask TMCs to rebuild their workflows or retrain their teams – it simply connects the gaps.
