If you’ve been following Business Travel News recently, you’ve probably read their investigative series on TMC content opacity. If you haven’t, we’d encourage you to do so. Not because it’s a story about bad actors, but because it’s a story about a system, and understanding the system is the first step to managing within it more effectively.
You can find articles one and two in these links.
The series examines why travel content in online booking tools sometimes differs from what’s available directly on airline and hotel websites. It explores the mix of technical, commercial, and configurational forces that shape what a traveler sees—and more importantly doesn’t see—when booking a trip. The answers are complicated. And for travel managers trying to run optimized, accountable programs, they matter enormously.
A System Built on Competing Incentives
The modern corporate travel ecosystem is genuinely complex. Travel management companies earn revenue from multiple sources simultaneously: transaction fees from corporate clients, distribution incentives from global distribution systems, and commercial arrangements with suppliers. None of this is secret, and none of it is inherently problematic. TMCs provide real value—service, negotiating leverage, program management, duty of care support—and they need sustainable business models to deliver it.
But those layered revenue streams create a structural tension that every travel manager should understand. When the entity managing your travel program also has financial relationships with the suppliers appearing in your booking results, the incentives don’t always align. Sometimes content gaps are purely technical—NDC connectivity challenges, cache issues, policy configurations that inadvertently narrow search results. Sometimes they reflect deliberate display decisions. And often, the travel manager can’t easily tell which is which.
The Critical Distinction: Technological vs. Commercial Gaps
As AmTrav by Perk CEO Jeff Klee put it in the BTN reporting, “It’s really important to distinguish between the technological content gaps and the commercial content gaps. One may be unavoidable in the short term due to connectivity choices. The other is very purposeful by the parties involved.”
That distinction is critical, and it’s one most travel managers currently lack the data to make.
What Travel Managers Are Actually Up Against
The ITM’s 2026 research, also released in February, found that nearly two-thirds of travel buyers are not confident they have access to the airline content they need—up from 59 percent just a year ago. Booking tool optimization and full content access now share the top spot as buyers’ most pressing priorities. Only one-third of respondents are satisfied with their OBT’s delivery of air content.
These numbers reflect a growing unease that’s hard to pin down precisely because the data to do so often doesn’t exist at the corporate level. When a traveler finds a lower fare on an airline website than in the OBT, the travel manager is notified. But for every complaint that surfaces, there are dozens of fare differentials no one notices, because travelers don’t always check, don’t bother escalating a $75 difference, or simply don’t know what they’re missing.
One airline executive noted in the BTN series that the complaints they receive tend to cluster around expensive routes because “most travelers, if they see a difference of $50 or $100 on a domestic route, they just don’t care enough to email the travel manager.”
What surfaces is a fraction of what exists, and decisions about suppliers, policy, and program value are being made with incomplete information.
The Case for an Independent Data Layer
The BTN series offers travel managers three paths forward: hope the problem resolves itself, change the OBT, or change the TMC. We’d suggest a fourth option that doesn’t require any of those: build an independent view of your own program.
This isn’t about auditing your TMC partner or approaching the relationship with suspicion. It’s about recognizing that in any complex, multi-party system, the participants closest to the data will always have an informational advantage. Healthy program management requires closing that gap.
Your finance team doesn’t rely solely on vendor-generated reports to manage spend. Your legal team doesn’t take a supplier’s word for contract compliance. Travel should be no different.
Why Independent Visibility Changes the Conversation
Traxo was built for exactly this purpose. Our platform aggregates travel data across all booking channels, including TMC, GDS, direct suppliers, OBT, OTA, and NDC, into a single, TMC-agnostic view of program activity. That means travel managers can see what was actually booked across all channels, regardless of how or where it was purchased.
It means leakage becomes visible rather than estimated. It means duty of care operates on real traveler locations, not just managed bookings. And it means that when you sit down with a TMC—your current one or a prospective one—you bring your own data to the conversation.
Independent visibility doesn’t create adversarial relationships. If anything, it creates better ones. When both parties work from the same complete data set, conversations shift from defensiveness to problem-solving.
A TMC that knows its client has full visibility has every incentive to act in the client’s best interest. And a travel manager who has full visibility is one who can advocate for their program with confidence to suppliers, procurement leadership, and the CFO who is questioning the value of managed travel.
The Right Question to Be Asking
The BTN series has sparked an important industry conversation, and we’re glad it’s happening. Content transparency is a real and growing challenge—one that affects program savings, supplier negotiations, and the credibility of managed travel as a discipline.
But the most useful question for travel managers isn’t “Is my TMC hiding content from me?” It’s “Do I have enough independent visibility into my own program to know?” If the answer is no, that’s the gap worth closing—not by changing partners, but by changing what you can see.
Your travel data belongs to your organization. Having complete, independent access to it isn’t a luxury. It’s the foundation of a program you can actually manage. Schedule a Free Consultation Today!
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