How to Run a Travel Management Company RFP Without Getting Sold To

The travel management company RFP promised a dedicated account team and a defined implementation timeline with hands-on adoption support. After signing, the account sits in a shared service pool, implementation stretches beyond the pitch, and adoption support turns out to be minimal. The mismatch is why your TMC request for proposal has to test service delivery before the sales team controls the conversation.

This guide breaks down the five phases of running a travel management company RFP as a service delivery audit. Run them in order and you walk away with a defensible sourcing decision instead of a sales-driven one.

Define Your TMC Requirements Before Contacting Vendors

Vendors use discovery calls to learn what you want to hear, then shape the proposal around it, so requirements have to exist before any vendor contact happens. Start with your own data: a granular breakdown of total transactions for the previous three years, including supplier transactions, fees paid, leakage, and growth projections. TMCs expect detail such as spend by carrier with transaction counts, top routes, online booking tool (OBT) adoption rate, and the share of volume under negotiated agreements.

Define the outcomes the new TMC must deliver before you score feature claims. Determine your top five or ten program goals before having any conversation with a TMC. Vendors that can't meet those needs get excluded from the process before they can shape it.

Last, build the evaluation criteria and weights before the RFP goes out. Stakeholders tend to overvalue what a preferred TMC does well at the end of a sourcing project, and weighted scorecards set in advance protect against that bias.

Use an RFI to Prequalify TMC Vendors Before the RFP

A short RFI of targeted questions filters the field before either side invests in a full travel management company RFP. Skipping prequalification can obligate you to evaluate inappropriate responses from vendors that never fit your program. Use the RFI to request:

• Staffing model. Whether dedicated agents, a shared pool, or a hybrid will serve your spend level.
• OBT adoption rates. Rates across the vendor's client base, especially at accounts comparable to yours.
• Fee schedule. Broken out by online versus offline, domestic versus international, and assisted versus unassisted transaction fees.
• Reference availability. Comparable and former-client references for the later reference-call phase.

The responses filter themselves. Watch for these red flags:

• Fees quoted as a percentage of air volume instead of a flat per-transaction amount, which gives the TMC an incentive to book higher fares.
• No adoption data for comparable accounts, which usually means the vendor can't produce it at your spend level.
• Refusal to break out revenue streams, which hides where the vendor actually makes money on your account.
• Marketing language in place of answers to specific operational questions, which shows how the vendor will respond to service issues after signing.

Direct Travel may already provide the managed TMC infrastructure, servicing relationship, and reporting framework your program needs. If routine bookings in that setup still move to agent assist, include that fulfillment-cost question in the RFI instead of treating it as a traveler-behavior assumption.

For Direct Travel customers, Otto the Agent is a narrow add-on comparison point: it adds AI-powered flight and hotel booking on top of that existing Direct Travel relationship so routine requests have a managed-channel path before they default to the call center. Use that scenario as an adoption and cost-control benchmark: fewer assisted transactions, cleaner compliance data, and a clearer view of whether the TMC's service model is the constraint.

RFP Questions That Reveal Real TMC Service Levels

Ask operational questions in the areas where the gap between the sales presentation and delivered service is widest. Tie every claim to a staffing model, fee trigger, service guarantee, or live proof point. The questions below cover the three areas where finalist pitches almost always break down under real conditions: account management, technology and the OBT, and disruption support.

Account Management

The named account manager matters more than the org chart, so start by identifying the specific person who will manage your account. Ask:

• Who is the named account manager, and will they attend the finalist presentation with operational staff (not the sales team)?
• How many accounts does that manager handle today?
• What is agent tenure and turnover at our service tier?
• What happens to the account if the named contact leaves or the TMC is acquired?

A large portfolio means you won't get the attention the pitch promised, one of the most common corporate travel management gaps that appears only after signing. So asking these questions will get you a clear picture.

Technology and the OBT

Actual OBT adoption data from clients at your spend level should come before platform capability claims. The baseline matters because TMCs can deploy technology beyond their staffing capacity, which leaves buyers with complicated service needs the vendor cannot absorb. Ask:

• What is your OBT adoption rate at accounts comparable to ours?
• Which booking types require agent assist, and what is the fee for each?
• At what point does an OBT booking become a transaction chargeable with a fee?
• Can you run a live demo on our actual travel scenarios? Scripted walkthroughs do not test your use cases, so they should not substitute for a workflow test.
• How do OBT hotel rates compare against consumer sites for the same properties?

Together, these answers show whether the OBT will hold managed spend in channel or quietly push it back to the call center at a fee.

Disruption and After-Hours Support

Documented rebooking performance during the last major weather disruption should come first because disruption response affects both traveler impact and fare exposure. Slow rebooking carries a direct price when travelers pay walk-up rates for replacement flights and hotels. Ask:

• What was your rebooking performance during the last major weather disruption, with numbers?
• Is after-hours support a dedicated team or a shared pool, and what is the fee difference between the two?
• What triggers a handoff from the AI or self-service tool to a human agent, and how fast does that handoff happen?
• What does the TMC guarantee when the automation fails?

The vendors that answer with specifics are the ones whose disruption response will hold up under real conditions; the ones that answer in generalities are telling you how the next irrops event will actually play out.

How to Run TMC Reference Calls That Surface Real Issues

Vendor-provided references are primed. Travel management companies rank last among key supplier categories for delivering desired service levels, scoring 3.4 on a 1-to-5 scale against airlines, hotels, and car suppliers. You reach an honest picture by controlling who you talk to and what you ask.

Who to request:

• References at your spend band and trip volume. A large global program will not show how a smaller program gets treated day to day.
• Former clients, especially those who ended the relationship for reasons other than consolidation. Ask why they left.

What to ask:

• Where production service-level agreements (SLAs) deviated most, and how the vendor responded when service dropped.
• Whether the reference would sign the same contract again knowing what they know now.

How to run the call:

• Conduct every call without the vendor present.
• Budget enough time to work through follow-ups. Rushed calls produce mediocre answers.

Reference calls handled this way turn a vendor formality into the second layer of your service delivery audit, and they set up the contract terms that lock the winning vendor's promises in writing.

Negotiate TMC Contract Terms Before You Commit

Do not award the business until both parties have agreed to every contract term; once the award is announced, your negotiating position collapses. Provide draft contract language during the RFP and ask bidders to return redlines. Each term below turns a sales promise into an enforceable obligation.

• Termination notice. Negotiate the right to terminate without cause on reasonable written notice, and never agree to cancellation clauses that block early solicitation of bids. Those clauses lock you into a renewal you didn't actively choose.
• Data portability. Confirm in writing that your company owns all traveler profiles and reservation records, and verify the export format and timing before signing. Silent ownership clauses become expensive at switch time.
• SLAs with financial remedies. Refusal to back a service claim with a measurable SLA is a red flag. Require specific response-time commitments paired with fee credits at a level that is meaningful against monthly transaction volume. Refuse any offer to set service levels after a "burn-in" period, because the incentive structure rewards making that negotiation painful enough that it never happens.
• Volume commitments. Minimum financial commitments can outlast the assumptions behind them and even transfer to an acquirer. Negotiate the smallest commitment the pricing allows, and ask for rebates of commissions and overrides attributable to your volume.
• Implementation timeline. Put the agreed timeline in the contract with implementation milestones covering data migration, system integration, policy configuration, and employee communication. Verbal timelines don't survive signing.
• Assignment clause. Standard merger-exception language lets a TMC contract transfer automatically to an acquiring company without your consent. Given recent TMC consolidation activity, require prior written consent before any assignment or change of control.

Keep Your Travel Management Company RFP From Becoming a Sales Decision

The gap between the sales process and delivered service is structural to TMC sales cycles. By the time a vendor reaches finalist status, the only claims that matter are the ones your data, references, operational tests, and contract language can enforce.

If the data shows routine bookings leaking to agent assist, treat it as a measurable service-design problem before restarting sourcing by default. Direct Travel may still be the right servicing relationship; Otto gives Direct Travel customers a low-risk way to test whether routine flight and hotel requests can stay in managed channels. Otto is free to try, with no contract or commitment, so the test does not require another vendor lock-in decision.

Start with Otto to test managed-channel adoption before your next TMC decision.

FAQ

How long should a travel management company RFP process take?

Plan for a multi-month process, and give vendors enough time to respond thoughtfully and your team enough time to evaluate proposals, then leave room for contract negotiation, since schedules often underestimate the time it requires. An RFI that filters the field first shortens every later stage.

How many TMCs should be included in an RFP?

Use the RFI to narrow the bidder list to a short list of qualified suppliers, then limit live presentations and demos to finalists only. Evaluating proposals from vendors that don't match your spend level or service needs consumes weeks of scoring time without improving the decision.

What's the most important contract term to negotiate in a TMC agreement?

Prioritize data portability. Without written language assigning traveler profile and booking data to your company, plus a verified export format, switching TMCs means rebuilding traveler profiles from scratch, and silent ownership clauses get most expensive during a TMC acquisition.

How do I evaluate TMC references without getting scripted responses?

Ask for clients at your spend band and in a similar industry; the vendor's largest accounts are poor comparisons. Ask where SLAs deviated in production and how the vendor responded when service dropped. Request former clients who left for reasons other than consolidation, and hold every call without the vendor on the line.

How do I make sure I have accurate program data before issuing a TMC RFP?

Requirements need a multi-year transaction breakdown that includes spend by category and adoption rates, which unmanaged programs usually can't produce. Pull them from current booking, expense, card, and supplier records before relying on a TMC's discovery process.

How can Direct Travel customers reduce agent-assist leakage without switching TMCs?

Add a managed-channel path for the routine flight and hotel requests that currently default to the call center. Otto handles those bookings on top of Direct Travel, so you can measure whether the service-model gap is really a booking-channel problem before you restart a sourcing cycle.