The biggest travel sellers increasingly aren't travel companies
Travel Weekly's 2026 Power List is topped by platforms — and beneath them the names rising fastest are a bank and a card issuer, companies that rent distribution rather than build it
The most powerful sellers of travel in 2026 increasingly don't sell travel for a living. Travel Weekly's annual Power List, out Monday, still runs on the usual giants at the top, but the movement underneath tells the story. A bank, Chase Travel, climbed into the top ten. A card issuer, American Express Travel, rose to seventh. And CWT, one of the oldest names in corporate travel, has vanished from the list entirely, absorbed into Amex GBT. The companies gaining ground are the ones that own a customer and a payment relationship, not a travel desk.
Driving the news. The 2026 list ranks sellers by 2025 sales — gross transaction value, not revenue, so the figures run far ahead of what these firms actually book as income. Booking Holdings tops it at $186.1 billion, up roughly $20 billion; Expedia Group follows at $119.6 billion. Then a cliff: nearly $100 billion separates Expedia from the third name, Amex GBT, at $36.3 billion, with BCD Travel ($24.4 billion) and Flight Centre ($16.4 billion) behind. Of 72 qualifying companies, 27 now clear $1 billion. Chase Travel ($12.6 billion) overtook CWT to enter the top ten; American Express Travel reached an estimated $11.1 billion.
The plumbing. A bank can sell $12 billion of travel because it does not have to build distribution — it rents it. The corporate-travel names on the list run on GDS APIs, the connections Amadeus, Sabre, and Travelport expose to feed air, hotel, and car content into any platform that wants it. The card and bank desks ride one layer higher, on white-label stacks: American Express Travel's hotel inventory is facilitated by Expedia, which markets a turnkey travel platform built specifically for financial institutions. Either way, inventory has become an API call. What stays scarce is the customer and the card on file, and that is exactly what a bank or a card network already holds.
What it means for hotels. The hotel's counterparty in the channel is changing character. For decades the firms steering managed and high-value demand were travel specialists. Increasingly they are balance-sheet companies — banks, card issuers, platforms — that wrapped a rented distribution layer around a customer base they already had. As agentic booking commoditizes the transaction further, the tilt sharpens: the booking keystroke is worth less each year, the relationship and the payment credential worth more. The list reads as a ranking of travel agencies. It is closer to a ranking of who owns the customer.
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