Beyond the RFP — Two types of TMC now control corporate booking. Is your hotel visible to both?
The enterprise tier runs on GDS. The mid-market tier aggregates from everywhere. Most independent hotels are only set up for one
The TMC market spent most of 2025 consolidating at speed. American Express Global Business Travel completed its $540 million acquisition of CWT, cementing its position as the world's largest travel management company by a substantial margin. Direct Travel acquired ATPI, forming a global operation built on Spotnana's technology infrastructure. FCM Travel and BCD continued to expand. By the end of the year, the upper tier of the TMC market had pulled further away from the field than at any point in the past decade.
That consolidation story is real and consequential. But it has obscured a more important structural shift: the TMC market is no longer a single tier. It has split into two distinct segments with different technology architectures, different customer profiles, and — critically for hotels — different distribution behaviors.
The enterprise tier: GDS-first, service-led, high volume
At the top of the market, the picture is relatively straightforward. Amex GBT, BCD Travel, and FCM Travel manage large multinational corporate travel programs. Their customers are enterprise companies with complex travel policies, duty of care requirements, and managed travel programs that have been built over years. These programs run primarily on GDS infrastructure — Amadeus, Sabre, and Travelport — with human travel agents available around the clock to service complex itineraries.
For hotels, the implication is uncomplicated: visibility in this tier requires a proper GDS presence. A hotel not on GDS is not in the conversation for enterprise managed travel programs, regardless of how good its product is. The rate loading precision covered in the previous article in this series applies here in full — negotiated rates that do not load correctly will not be booked, and the volume at stake is significant.
The consolidation trend reinforces this. Amex GBT now manages a larger share of global corporate travel volume than at any point in its history. Hotels that are properly set up on GDS and have their content optimized have just become visible to a larger pool of managed travelers through a single channel relationship.
The SME and mid-market tier: tech-first, multi-source, growing fast
The more disruptive shift is happening in the SME and mid-market segment, where a new category of platform has emerged that operates on fundamentally different principles.
Navan, now publicly listed on Nasdaq, describes itself as an all-in-one business travel, payments, and expense management platform. Its hotel inventory — 2.6 million properties — pulls from GDS content via Sabre and Amadeus, OTA feeds from Expedia, Booking.com, and MakeMyTrip, and direct connections to hotel brands including Wyndham, Travelodge UK, and Premier Inn. In March 2026, Navan launched a new AI-powered hotel catalog that uses large language models to reconcile inconsistent room and rate data across all those sources into a single verified listing — increasing visible rate options by 70 percent according to the company. The direction of travel is clear: Navan is building toward a proprietary lodging marketplace with an expanding set of direct hotel relationships alongside its existing distribution sources.
Perk, formerly TravelPerk, covers similar ground from a slightly different angle. Its platform combines travel booking with expense and spend management, and like Navan it pulls hotel inventory from GDS and OTA sources simultaneously. Its recent acquisition of Yokoy and its expanded Amadeus NDC connectivity signal a platform that is actively widening its content access rather than narrowing it.
Both platforms share a defining characteristic: they do not rely on a single distribution source. They aggregate, normalize, and present inventory from wherever it is available — and they are building the tools to surface it more intelligently over time.
A note on infrastructure: Spotnana
One name that appears regularly in TMC technology discussions is Spotnana. It is worth understanding what it is, because it is not a platform hotels interact with directly.
Spotnana is Travel-as-a-Service infrastructure — a cloud-native technology layer that TMCs license to power their own booking platforms. Direct Travel's Avenir platform runs on Spotnana. Several other forward-thinking TMCs are building on it. Spotnana pulls content from GDS, NDC direct connections, OTAs, and other sources, and makes it available through a unified interface for the TMCs that use it.
Hotels do not list on Spotnana, negotiate with Spotnana, or manage content on Spotnana. Their inventory reaches Spotnana-powered platforms through the same sources it reaches everywhere else — primarily GDS and the major OTAs. There is nothing for a hotel to act on here specifically. It is included because understanding Spotnana's role clarifies why GDS and OTA coverage together matter: any platform built on Spotnana's infrastructure will surface inventory from both, and gaps in either will create gaps in visibility on those platforms.
What hotels need to do differently for each tier
The two-tier structure has direct practical implications that go beyond simply being on GDS and OTAs.
For the enterprise tier, the priority is corporate rate program discipline. Amex GBT and its peers manage programs where negotiated rates, preferred hotel status, and RFP participation determine which properties appear in a traveler's shortlist. Being on GDS is the entry requirement. Being preferred — which means negotiating a rate, loading it correctly, and maintaining content quality — is what determines whether that GDS presence actually generates bookings. Hotels targeting enterprise corporate accounts need an active RFP strategy, accurate rate loading, and content that meets the standards corporate travel managers apply when sourcing: meeting space, WiFi specifications, sustainability credentials, and cancellation terms.
For the Navan and Perk tier, the requirements are different. These platforms serve SME and mid-market companies whose travelers are often booking with less oversight and more self-service autonomy. Rate competitiveness matters more than preferred status. Content quality — accurate room descriptions, good photography, correct amenities — determines whether a property appears favorably in an AI-normalized search result. Navan's new hotel catalog makes this concrete: properties with inconsistent or incomplete content across distribution sources will be deprioritized or deduplicated out of results entirely. The investment in clean, consistent content across GDS and OTAs is not just about direct bookings — it is about performing well on the platforms increasingly handling mid-market corporate travel.
The practical to-do list for a hotel serious about both tiers: maintain a clean, fully optimized GDS profile; ensure OTA content — descriptions, photos, amenities — is complete and consistent across Booking.com and Expedia; participate in the RFP process for enterprise accounts that are relevant to the property's market; and make sure public rates are competitive enough to perform in self-service searches on platforms where no preferred relationship exists.
The consolidation context
The broader TMC consolidation of 2025 is worth watching for one specific reason: as the enterprise tier concentrates volume into fewer, larger players, the negotiating leverage those players hold over hotels increases. A hotel that is preferred by Amex GBT — now managing CWT's former customer base as well — has access to a substantially larger pool of managed travelers than a preferred Amex GBT property had two years ago. The value of getting the enterprise tier relationship right has gone up, not down.
At the same time, the mid-market platforms are growing faster than the enterprise tier. Navan's transaction volume is increasing at rates that legacy TMCs are not matching. Perk is expanding aggressively in the US and Europe. The SME and mid-market segment is where corporate travel growth is concentrating — and it is the segment most likely to include the kinds of independent, lifestyle, and boutique properties that hospitality.today's readers operate.
For independent hotels, both tiers matter. The enterprise tier for the high-value negotiated business. The mid-market tier for the volume and ADR that comes from being well-positioned in self-service corporate searches. The distribution infrastructure that serves both is the same: GDS as the foundation, OTA presence as the complement, and content quality as the factor that determines performance on an increasingly AI-mediated booking surface.
Next in this series: The corporate RFP in 2026 — what has changed, what still works, and what independent hotels should stop doing
by Markus Busch, Editor/Publisher Hospitality.today
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