The signs it's time to switch

Corporate travel management is one of those things that tends to deteriorate slowly. Your TMC was fine when you signed up. Then response times got a little slower. Then you realized no one on their side actually knows your travelers. Then a $875 nonrefundable ticket sat unused because no one was tracking credits. By the time it becomes a real problem, you've often been tolerating it for months.

Here are the most common signs that your current setup isn't working — drawn from conversations with companies that made the switch:

  • ⏱
    Response times measured in hours, not minutes. When a traveler has an urgent booking issue at 8pm before an early flight, "we'll get back to you within 24 hours" isn't an answer. If your TMC doesn't have a real after-hours number that someone picks up, that's a problem.
  • 👤
    No one on their side knows your account. Every call starts with re-explaining who you are, what your policy is, and what you need. If you're talking to a different agent every time, you're being handled by a call center — not managed by a dedicated team.
  • 🎫
    Unused ticket credits expiring unnoticed. Unused credits are one of the most common sources of invisible waste in corporate travel. A proactive TMC tracks these and surfaces them before they expire. If you're finding out about expired credits after the fact, no one is watching your program.
  • 📊
    Monthly reports that require manual cleanup. If your finance team is going line by line through statements to piece together what travel actually cost last month, your TMC isn't providing real reporting — they're providing raw data and calling it a report.
  • 🚫
    Travelers booking outside the system. When employees regularly bypass Concur or call the TMC and just book directly on Expedia instead, it's usually because using the approved system is too painful. That's a TMC configuration problem, not a traveler compliance problem.

The honest test: If your account manager left tomorrow and was replaced by someone new, how long would it take for that person to understand your program? If the answer is "weeks" or "I don't know," your program lives in someone's head rather than in a properly managed account. That's a risk.

Who's most likely to be underserved by their current TMC

Not every company is at the same risk of being underserved. The companies most likely to be getting inadequate service from their TMC share a common profile: they're mid-size, with somewhere between $200K and $2M in annual travel spend. Large enough to need real management, but not large enough to be a priority account at an enterprise TMC.

At providers like Navan, BCD Travel, and Egencia, the economics work best on accounts spending $5M or more annually. Below that threshold, you're typically routed to a shared service model — a pool of agents handling many accounts, no named contact, limited customization. The platform technology may be excellent, but the human layer is effectively absent.

This isn't a criticism of those platforms — it's just how the economics of enterprise software work. But if your company is in that $100K–$2M range and you feel like an afterthought, that feeling is accurate.