While the industry seeks the next silver-bullet booking platform, does the real future of travel management lie with the players who fill the gaps, stitching existing systems together to create something even better?
Some years ago, while attending a regular drawing class in London, my teacher gave me a useful tip: The trick is to draw the space between the figures.
That idea — that the structure lies in the negative space — has stayed with me far beyond those sketchpad evenings. And lately, it’s been resurfacing in conversations I’ve had on the evolution of corporate travel.
Instead of dramatic disruptions, it seems to me that the most innovative travel companies are redrawing the map from the inside out, adding shade and depth to the spaces in between.
Colouring in the blank spaces
Alexander Creyf, operational director at Travel Experts, illustrates this story perfectly. Twenty-three years ago, they were a corporate travel firm. Today, Travel Experts are Europe’s largest luxury advisor network.
“We’re not really a TMC anymore,” Alexander told me. “The advisor model has more future, because it’s rooted in human connection.”
Their corporate travel arm still runs, but not for profit; it’s connective tissue for VIPs where flights aren’t margin-makers, but part of the full picture.
This mindset shift from “what we sell” to “what we support” mirrors a wider pattern across the industry.
Beyond the blue screen
For years, the GDS defined the rhythm of corporate travel: the clunky blue screens, the shortcut keys — all of it felt irreplaceable.
“Even our top advisors, the ones doing a few million, don’t touch the GDS anymore,” Alexander said. Not because they’ve rebelled against it, but because it stopped being essential.
What’s challenging the legacy system isn’t a better version of the old way, it’s a modular network of APIs, integrations, and middleware built out of necessity, but maturing fast. Perhaps messier, but infinitely more flexible.
The industry hasn’t found its new operating system; it’s building one in real time.
The identity paradox
Few companies capture this moment better than Spotnana. Part software platform, part TMC following its acquisition of Direct Travel, Spotnana is still figuring out what it wants to be. And that might just be its superpower.
“Spotnana doesn’t even know exactly what it is yet. But it’s interesting,” Alexander says.
This blend of certainty and experimentation allows them to operate across boundaries, critiquing the old system while benefitting from its muscle memory.
Layering new dimensions
Jack Dow, founder of Grapevine, recently showed me a voice demo inside WhatsApp:
“Hey Sophie, I need a hotel near our Chicago office…” Within seconds, options appear, filtered by company policy, price cap and past preferences. No app, no chatbot awkwardness — just a human-like exchange within a channel travellers already use.
“We’re layering conversational AI on the existing agent workflow,” Jack told me.
For TMCs, this opens entirely new revenue streams. When travellers interact freely with Sophie, they naturally add services they’d never think to book through traditional channels. “Need ground transportation to your hotel?” Sophie might ask, keeping everything in policy while capturing incremental revenue.
Operating in the shadows
Travellers never see the Grapevine brand; they see their TMC’s name. “That’s the point,” Jack told me.
Similarly, HotelHub doesn’t seek to be the face of operations. It’s the essential, but hidden, wiring behind many TMC workflows, normalising hotel content from any source and quietly plugging it into the TMC’s preferred booking tools.
One recent significant development has been HotelHub’s integration with SAP Concur’s new Hotel Connector, enabling any TMC to access and manage multi-source hotel content via Concur. Unlocking HotelHub’s powerful content management capabilities, this turnkey integration allows TMCs to drive more commercially advantageous bookings while delivering an enhanced service to customers — all without having to completely rebuild their existing tech stack.
While venture capital chases the next all-singing, all-dancing booking front end, it’s often the infrastructure nobody sees — but everybody needs — that is really transforming the face of travel management.
A new financial blueprint
Other operators focus deeper in the stack, tackling monetary obstacles.
“Our goal is to become the bank of the hospitality world,” Paul Beukers, CCO & co-founder at Katanox said. Hotels get paid instantly, TMCs get commission without chasing spreadsheets. Clean, integrated and hard to replicate.
Travel Experts approach it differently: “We just pay net to the hotel and invoice the client. The advisor keeps the margin. No commission reconciliation. We saved a full-time employee just by not having the mess of commission chasing for the hotels.”
In both cases, the same principle applies: it’s elegant, but not easy. The models only work if you’ve built strong, direct contracts with hotels. Without them, you’re back in the weeds: waiting on third parties, reconciling payments months after checkout; losing time and trust.
Scale and global impact remain the ever-present goal.
Modern execution; traditional service
As tech transforms travel, a truth is surfacing: the human-led channel isn’t dying; it’s winning.
Self-serve tools may be the table stakes, but the real competitive edge is knowing when a traveller needs something they can’t click their way through.
Jeff Ochaita, Senior Director, Customer Technology & Global Solutions, at Adelman Travel puts it plainly:
“Technology delivers features; people deliver trust. And in corporate travel, trust is currency. Your client’s flight is cancelled, hotel sold out, meetings start at 8am. Who picks up the phone? Who solves it without fuss? That’s what they remember. Not the interface. Not the backend logic.”
Jeff calls it “modern execution, traditional service”.
“You need both,” he says. “You’ve got to be operationally slick, but emotionally intelligent. Our job is to move fast and still make people feel taken care of.”
A modern service model knows when to automate and when to step in. It’s the travel counsellor who spots a conflict before it becomes chaos. It’s the system that disappears at the right moment. It’s a partner who knows how to handle pressure and doesn’t hide behind platforms.
The new travel management syntax
These stories aren’t tales of disruption but glimpses of a new travel management syntax emerging. A thesaurus of technological combinations.
Labels that once defined everything are blurring: “corporate” vs “leisure”, “agent” vs “platform”, “legacy” vs “innovation”. Instead of pitching these concepts against each other, the new syntax says, “Yes, and…”
The most resilient companies are hybrid by design, combining legacy structures with new logic, scale with specificity, automation with human touch.
Because, for all the talk about AI and APIs, this business is still relational. The tools help — but it’s the human behind them who turns an itinerary into a plan someone can rely on. The winners use technology to scale relationships, not replace them.
So, let’s stop waiting for the perfect all-in-one technology — say “yes” to the tech stack AND to the excellent human operator — and let’s start colouring outside the lines. In the space between.
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.
