We Analyzed Every Major TMC and Here's Why They're All Missing the Point

The world of corporate travel management is dominated by a few behemoth Travel Management Companies (TMCs). They sell a compelling narrative of global scale, comprehensive service, and risk management. We decided to look past the marketing gloss. Our team spent months analyzing the platforms, service models, and real-world user experiences of every major legacy TMC. The conclusion was both simple and damning: they are all missing the point.

They are all competing on the wrong battlefield. They talk about their thousands of agents, their global presence, and their complex reporting capabilities. But they fail to address the single most fundamental driver of a successful travel program's success or failure: user adoption. If your employees hate using your corporate travel tools, your program is dead on arrival. It does not matter how good your negotiated rates are if no one uses them. It does not matter how powerful your reporting is if half your travel data is missing because people are booking on Expedia.

The entire business model of the legacy TMC is built on a foundation of outdated technology and a deep misunderstanding of modern user behavior. They see the traveler as a subject to be controlled, not a customer to be won over. This is why so many companies feel heartbroken by their traditional TMCs.

The Core Failure: A Disrespect for the User

The online booking tools (OBTs) provided by most major TMCs are, frankly, terrible. They are clunky, slow, and have a user interface that feels a decade old. In a world where your employees are used to the seamless, one-click experience of consumer apps, forcing them to use a frustrating corporate tool is a recipe for revolt.

This isn’t just an aesthetic issue. It has a massive financial impact.

The Problem: Low adoption rates are a direct result of a poor user experience. When a booking tool is difficult to use, employees will find a way around it. They will book on public websites they are familiar with, a practice known as "rogue booking."
The Financial Leakage: Our analysis found that companies using legacy TMCs often have "rogue booking" rates of 40-50%. This means for half of your company's travel, you have:
- No cost control: You cannot enforce your advance booking policies or hotel price caps.
- No visibility: You have no real-time data on that spend, making budgeting impossible.
- No Duty of Care: You do not know where your travelers are, which is a massive liability.

Legacy TMCs try to solve this with mandates and punitive policies, but you cannot force adoption of a bad product. You have to win it. The real reason for low adoption is a failure of the platform to provide value to the user.

Missing the Point on "Integration"

Another area where major TMCs miss the point is on the concept of an integrated system. They sell an "all-in-one" suite that supposedly handles travel, expense, and payment. But in reality, these are often separate, poorly connected pieces of software, frequently acquired from other companies and bolted together.

The "Integrated" Lie: The most common failure is the gap between the travel booking tool and the expense reporting tool. An employee books a flight in one system and then, after the trip, has to manually re-enter all of that same flight data into a different expense system. This is a complete waste of your employees' time. It's the $50,000 mistake of a disconnected system.
The Modern Approach: A truly modern platform, like Routespring, is built from the ground up as a single, unified system. When a trip is booked, the expense report is created automatically. The data flows seamlessly. This isn't just a feature; it's a fundamental change in philosophy. It's about respecting your employees' time and eliminating redundant administrative work.

Missing the Point on Service

Traditional TMCs pride themselves on their service, pointing to their large call centers of travel agents. But this often misses the point of what "service" means in the digital age.

Reactive vs. Proactive: If an employee has to call an agent to book a simple flight, that is not service; it is a failure of your technology. Good service means having a platform so intuitive that your employees don't need to call an agent for routine tasks.
The Role of Human Experts: Human agents are still critically important, but their role should be elevated. They should be there for the complex situations where their expertise is truly needed: managing a complex multi-city itinerary, providing VIP service for an executive, or, most importantly, handling a major travel disruption. A modern TMC uses technology for efficiency and reserves human experts for high-value problem-solving.

The Point They Are All Missing

After analyzing every major TMC, the point they are all missing is this: A successful travel program is a consumer product that must be sold to your internal employees. You have to win their business just like any consumer company does. You do that by offering a product that is:

A Joy to Use: The user experience must be fast, intuitive, and beautiful.
Genuinely Helpful: It must solve their biggest problems, like the nightmare of expense reports.
Trustworthy: It must provide comprehensive options and be backed by reliable, expert support when needed.

This is the philosophy we used to build Routespring. We did not start by asking how to build a TMC. We started by asking how to build a travel experience that employees would actually love using. By focusing on the user first, we found that all the other benefits that finance and travel managers care about like high compliance, real-time data, and cost control follow naturally.

The legacy TMCs are missing the point because they are still operating with a top-down, command-and-control mindset. The future of business travel belongs to platforms that embrace a bottom-up, user-centric approach.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

1. Our TMC says they have a 90% adoption rate. Is that possible? You need to be very careful about how that metric is defined. Some TMCs will measure adoption as any booking that touches their system, including offline agent-assisted bookings. This can mask a very low online adoption rate for their self-service tool. You should ask for the specific online adoption rate, which is the percentage of total bookings made by employees themselves through the OBT without agent assistance.

2. Is it better to have one all-in-one platform or to pick the "best-of-breed" for travel and expense separately? This is a trap many companies fall into. While it seems logical to pick the "best" individual tools, you are then responsible for the massive headache of trying to integrate them. The data gap between the systems almost always leads to the manual re-entry problem. A modern, truly integrated all-in-one platform, where travel and expense are part of the same native system, is almost always the more efficient and cost-effective solution.

3. We are a global company. Can a modern platform handle our complex international needs? Yes. This is a common myth perpetuated by legacy TMCs. Modern platforms like Routespring are built on global, cloud-native architecture. They can handle multiple currencies, international tax requirements (like VAT), and global travel policies with ease and often with more flexibility than their older, more rigid counterparts.

4. The big TMCs say they have exclusive content and better discounts. Is this true? This is largely a sales tactic. The travel inventory landscape has been democratized. A modern travel platform aggregates content from multiple sources, including the GDS, direct airline connections (NDC), and various online travel agencies. This ensures you have access to a comprehensive and competitive range of options. While legacy TMCs may have some specific hotel-rate programs, a modern platform's ability to drive compliance and adopt other cost-saving measures almost always outweighs the marginal benefit of these "exclusive" rates.

5. How do we convince our leadership to switch from our current, well-known TMC? You need to build a business case focused on the total cost of ownership. Do not just compare the transaction fees. Quantify the "hidden costs" of your current program: the cost of low adoption (overspending from rogue bookings), the cost of lost productivity (time wasted on clunky tools and manual expense reports), and the cost of missed savings (like unused ticket credits). When you present the full picture, the ROI of switching to a more efficient, modern platform becomes undeniable.