Corporate travel RFP best practices: what separates good from great
For enterprise travel managers, running RFPs is a familiar process. You’ve refined your evaluation templates across multiple cycles. You know which vendor claims to probe, how to structure reference calls to match your business priorities, and how to build the internal coalition that makes a TMC decision stick.
Now, as the landscape you’re evaluating has changed, you’re faced with drastically different criteria introduced by a new generation of travel management companies.
These modern TMCs operate in fundamentally new ways, providing cost saving opportunities, greater program visibility, and a traveler experience that simply isn’t possible with traditional players.
This is a different end goal and it changes what a great RFP looks like. The strongest evaluations now go beyond confirming that candidates meet established standards. They're designed to identify which vendors represent a genuine step forward and which are optimized for a world that's already changing.
Hank Benedetti, CCO at Blockskye, has been on both sides of the table for many years, and his view is clear: The travel managers who run the best RFPs are the ones who pair deep program knowledge with sharp questions about what modern platforms have actually made possible.
“The strongest RFPs ask fewer but better questions. They’re designed to provide a relative grading scale between the vendors competing for your business, not just confirm that everyone can clear the bar—especially when the bar is now much higher.”
The one question missing from most corporate travel RFPs
If you ask Benedetti to name the single most important question missing from most corporate travel RFPs today, he answers quickly: online trip completion rate.
Most travel program RFP checklists include a question about online adoption, which sounds like the same thing. But online adoption only captures whether a ticket was sold through an online channel. Virtually every travel agency has been able to do that for 25 years.
A better question targets online trip completion rate, meaning what percentage of transactions are fully resolved, from start to finish, without agent assistance? Online trip completion rate includes not just the initial booking, but also trip changes a traveler initiates, schedule updates an airline pushes mid-trip, cancellations and rebookings, and ancillary adds like bags or seat upgrades.
Modern TMCs have made high online trip completion rates achievable for the first time. It’s a huge opportunity for the industry. When the online trip completion rate is high, travelers move through their journeys with minimal friction and TMC agents focus on genuine exceptions and high-touch interactions. Programs benefit from cost savings due to fewer agent calls and travelers get a better experience through self-servicing.
Changing that one question in your RFP, from “online adoption” to “online trip completion”, creates genuine differentiation between vendors and opens a more productive conversation about how each TMC operates. The question allows you to differentiate whether the underlying infrastructure is modern and built for traveler flexibility without the constraints of legacy content types or inconsistent NDC integrations that break down after booking.
How supplier connectivity shapes content, pricing, and travel data quality
How a TMC connects to suppliers shapes everything travelers experience: the completeness of booking options, whether fares reflects true availability and direct supplier pricing, and whether what gets booked can be serviced without gaps downstream.
Benedetti recommends asking every TMC candidate directly:
Which specific supplier content is available directly via NDC and other API connections?
What functionality is active for these connections?
What percentage of your bookings are processed through these direct integrations?
And importantly, how does the connectivity type and commercial arrangement influence search results?
Content and servicing
These questions help you understand exactly what your travelers can—and can't—access through the managed channel, so you're not discovering content gaps after the program goes live. They also surface something less obvious: whether NDC bookings are being processed in a way that inadvertently drives up servicing costs.
The quality of direct integrations varies significantly between vendors. Asking for specifics on functionality and booking volume gives you a ground-level view of how those integrations actually perform, not just whether they exist.
Supplier economics
Direct supplier connectivity drastically improves economics too. With legacy platforms, approximately 20% of a trip's value is extracted by the infrastructure layers sitting between buyers and suppliers through GDS fees, hotel commissions, and manual expense processes. Removing those extra layers, connecting systems directly, and creating a single real-time source of truth changes the economics for everyone—but only if outstanding TMC commercial arrangements don’t quietly reintroduce the same distortions.
Asking how connectivity type and commercial arrangements influence search results tells you whether your preferred suppliers are actually surfaced first or whether you're paying for infrastructure that's been optimized for the TMC's economics rather than yours.
Travel data quality
Supplier connectivity also has a direct relationship to travel data quality. When booking, servicing, and payment flow through well-integrated, direct connections, the resulting data is often more reliable and coherent. Without duplicate and diverging sources of ‘truth’, travel managers face less work to reconcile numbers from before reporting can be trusted by finance and the broader leadership team.
How an audit of your own program improves vendor evaluation
One thing Benedetti observes consistently from the vendor side: Most programs have more to discover about themselves than a standard reporting cycle surfaces. Data from different sources tells different stories. Compliance rates that look solid in aggregate often have real variation by route, traveler group, or booking channel.
Conducting a managed travel data audit before the RFP creates clarity to help you define requirements that are specific and well founded. The checklist below is a practical starting point.
Pre-RFP corporate travel program audit checklist
What to audit before your next corporate travel RFP
Run this travel program RFP checklist before you call a single vendor:
Data consistency across sources: Does supplier, TMC, credit card, and expense data agree? Or do you spend time reconciling them before every reporting cycle?
Online trip completion rate: What percentage of transactions are completed without agent intervention, including changes, cancellations, and schedule updates?
Supplier content coverage: Can travelers access the same content and fares through your managed channel that they'd find going directly to a supplier website?
Revenue model transparency: Do you know how your current TMC generates its income, and does supplier commission influence content displays, functionality and experience?
Unused ticket and credit leakage: Is stranded value being surfaced at the time of booking, or discovered after it expires?
Policy compliance at point of booking: Is compliance embedded in the booking experience, or enforced through approvals and audits after the fact?
Executive awareness of the program: Do your finance and procurement leaders have enough visibility into the travel program to support a change when the time comes?
TMC RFP questions that get you comparable insights
Modern TMCs compete on dimensions that didn't meaningfully exist a generation ago: direct connectivity, data architecture, self-service traveler experiences. When you account for this in your RFP structure, you get answers that actually differentiate candidates rather than confirming shared baseline capabilities.
The TMC RFP process produces the most useful output when questions are built around your specific program objectives and oriented toward the future as much as the present. Asking about a vendor’s technology roadmap, including plans for innovation in expense, payments, data, and supplier connectivity, tells you more than just asking about current features. It reveals whether the vendor is building toward the program you want to run in the months and years to come.
Reference conversations with existing clients are a reliable way to pressure-test what RFP responses claim. Buyers can get the most out of those calls by asking how modern architecture improves program visibility, generates structural cost savings, and improves traveler satisfaction by systematically removing friction.
Questioning the modern travel management approach and underlying infrastructure is what turns your RFP from a vendor selection exercise into a genuine program transformation decision.
Building executive alignment before the RFP begins
The RFP decision isn’t yours to make alone. And, at the end of the process, when the top TMC contender might seem like an obvious choice to you, it isn’t necessarily as clear for executives and other stakeholders that don’t live and breathe travel.
Benedetti's advice to travel managers who are six months out from RFP is to begin with an honest assessment of how finance and procurement leadership perceive the current program, and whether those leaders would support a change to a modern TMC and not an incumbent provider if that's where the evaluation leads.
Benedetti puts it plainly, "a TMC change is not a good time to meet your CFO." The shared context, clear picture of program performance, and alignment on what the program should accomplish all need to be in place before the evaluation starts and definitely before it concludes.
Part of that groundwork is recognizing that non-travel executives are working from a very different information baseline. Travel managers stay current through industry events, peer networks, and trade media coverage of what modern platforms can actually do. Finance and procurement leaders aren't getting that context. The evolution of NDC and direct supplier connectivity doesn’t mean anything to them.
What these stakeholders know about travel management is often shaped by your current TMC relationship and availability functionality. Often, there’s also an inherent assumption that switching to something newer carries meaningful risk.
Closing that gap is part of the travel manager's job before the RFP even launches. You have to convey what’s genuinely changed (better data infrastructure, direct content access, modern reporting), translated into terms a CFO or CPO can evaluate their own way. The goal isn't to sell a platform. It's to make the case for why the category itself has matured, so that choosing a modern TMC doesn't feel like a leap of faith to people who weren't in the room for the demos.
Travel managers who build that foundation early move through the RFP with momentum, and they arrive at the final recommendation with stakeholders who are already aligned and ready to make the big decision.
Three tools to strengthen your RFP preparation
Before evaluating any new vendor, it helps to understand your current operating model clearly enough to know precisely what you're trying to fix.
Our Modern Travel Operating Model Scorecard walks through six dimensions of how your program runs today: connectivity, automation, data integrity, policy effectiveness, operational load, and trust and transparency. Your scores in each let you place your program in one of three operating model states.
Our Reactive vs. Predictive Travel KPI Checklist helps you assess whether your current metrics are telling you about problems before they escalate, or only after costs and disruptions are already locked in.
And finally, our Modern Travel Demo Preparation Guide gives you a set of questions to bring into vendor demonstrations. It’s specifically designed to reveal how a platform handles real-world conditions like mid-trip changes, unused credit management, and data synchronization, rather than polished use cases.
Together, these tools give you and your finance and procurement stakeholders a shared language for the evaluation before a single vendor is on the phone.
Unlocking opportunity in your RFP
For most travel managers, running a new corporate travel RFP is genuinely energizing. It’s a real chance to shape the program they know is possible, one where compliance is built in, data is trustworthy, and the team is spends their time on strategy rather than cleanup. It also represents a significant, highly visible career step at any large organization with thousands of travelers.
The questions we’ve covered are the ones that help you get there. They surface how a modern vendor’s platform actually performs, not just how well it presents. They reveal which platforms are operating on infrastructure built for a different era.
The preparation makes the difference. Travel managers who go in knowing their program’s operating model, their team’s real friction points, and the specific outcomes they want to improve ask better questions, compare vendors more clearly, and arrive at decisions their leadership team is ready to support.
Start with the Modern Travel Operating Model Scorecard. It takes just a few minutes and gives you a clear-eyed view of where your program is today and where the right partner can take it.
Frequently asked questions
What is the most important question to ask in a corporate travel RFP?
The most valuable question to add to a corporate travel RFP is one that many buyers haven’t yet included: what percentage of your trips don’t involve an agent at all? This measures online trip completion rate across the full trip lifecycle, including changes, cancellations, and mid-trip disruptions, not just the initial booking. Online trip completion rate reveals how much operational load a vendor’s platform actually eliminates and creates meaningful differentiation between candidates.
What should a travel program RFP checklist cover?
A travel program RFP checklist should include questions that differentiate incumbent vendors from modern TMCs, rather than simply confirm minimum capability. The most effective checklists address online trip completion rate, supplier connectivity and content access, TMC revenue structure, travel data quality and reporting timelines, and the vendor’s technology roadmap across expense, payments, and supplier connectivity. Before writing those questions, the checklist should also prompt an internal program review so that requirements reflect your actual operational starting point.
How do you conduct a managed travel data audit before an RFP?
A managed travel data audit before a TMC RFP involves reviewing your program’s key data sources, including supplier records, agency data, corporate card feeds, and expense outputs, to understand where they align and where reconciliation is still a manual step. The goal is to understand how much of your team’s time flows toward proactive program management versus reactive reconciliation. A thorough audit also examines unused ticket recovery, compliance patterns by route or traveler group, and how much operational effort currently sits with your team rather than running automatically through your systems.
What makes a TMC RFP process more effective?
A TMC RFP process becomes more effective when internal preparation precedes vendor evaluation. Travel managers who review travel data quality, identify specific operational gaps, and align finance and procurement leadership before writing vendor questions tend to run faster evaluations and produce requirements grounded in operational reality. Structuring questions to create genuine comparison between vendors, rather than confirming that everyone passes the same test, and staying focused on the program you want in the years ahead rather than just the program you have today, consistently produces stronger selection outcomes.
What is an online trip completion rate?
Online trip completion rate is the percentage of travel transactions (initial bookings, changes, cancellations, and mid-trip disruptions) that are resolved without agent assistance. It is a more complete measure of TMC automation than online adoption rate, which only tracks whether a booking was made through an online channel.
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