The corporate RFP season is here. The rate it sets no longer lasts the year.
Continuous benchmarking is replacing the annual lock: a won rate now stays under review all year instead of holding until the next cycle.
Hotels are sitting down this season to a familiar ritual. The corporate RFP arrives, rates get submitted, terms get negotiated, a number gets locked for the year. Win it and you have a preferred rate and a volume commitment until the next cycle. The rhythm has been annual for as long as managed travel has existed, and most properties are treating this season as one more turn of it.
The rhythm is breaking — and not where you'd expect. The negotiation itself is as alive as ever. What's coming loose is the calendar: the assumption that a rate gets set once and holds until the next Q4.
What's already eroded
Start with what's measurable, not predicted. GBTA–Cvent research found that 47 percent of corporate travel managers now negotiate dynamic discounts at the property level alongside fixed rates — up from roughly 20 percent three years ago. A dynamic discount is a percentage off the hotel's BAR, not a flat negotiated number. So for nearly half of corporate programs, part of the deal already moves with the market.
Be careful not to overread that. Fixed rates still dominate — roughly 85 percent of accepted corporate rates, and buyers still say they want them. Cvent's own season data shows corporations holding to fixed even as they fold dynamic pricing in at the edges, with the harder push toward dynamic coming from the big brands rather than the buyers. Fixed isn't going anywhere this season. It's just sharing the table now.
The more telling gap is between what buyers want and what the tools are being built to do. Buyers still prefer the fixed lock; the sourcing machinery is being rebuilt for something else entirely. That's the part worth watching — preference is lagging the infrastructure, and the infrastructure is where the next few seasons get decided.
That's the established part. What comes next is where the procurement-technology vendors are pointing, and their direction deserves a skeptical read: the companies describing the future of sourcing are the same ones selling the software that delivers it.
Where the tooling is heading
The destination they describe is continuous sourcing. The annual cycle gives way to year-round monitoring: a buyer's system benchmarks every negotiated rate against live market rates, and re-opens the negotiation automatically when the rate drifts past a set threshold. A re-bid triggered by the market moving, not the calendar turning. On top of that sits AI that recommends price targets, flags the moment to renegotiate, and — in the vendors' telling — eventually runs parts of the renegotiation itself.
Treat the timeline with suspicion. The voices announcing the death of the annual RFP are overwhelmingly the vendors selling its replacement, repeating the claim across their own blogs. "Obsolete by 2026" is a sales forecast wearing the clothes of a market fact. But the underlying direction is real, and the GBTA–Cvent shift corroborates it: corporate sourcing is being rebuilt to treat a negotiated rate as a live position to monitor, not a settled outcome to file.
What it does to the thing you win
Consider what that does to the prize. Win an RFP today and you have a rate locked for twelve months — settled, filed, done until next year. Win one in a continuous-sourcing program and you have something stranger: a rate under permanent review, benchmarked against the market, re-opened the moment a system decides it's drifted. The negotiation never really ends. It just goes quiet between the alerts.
That changes what a hotel is defending. A fixed rate had to be competitive once, the week it was signed. A continuously benchmarked rate has to stay competitive every week it's in force — because the system watching it is comparing it to live rates, including the public and dynamic rates the same hotel is publishing everywhere else. The negotiated rate and the open-market rate stop being separate conversations. Let your public rate dip below your corporate rate mid-year, and a continuous-sourcing system is built to notice, and to ask why.
What you actually win
None of this makes the negotiation matter less. It changes what the win is. A fixed annual rate was a number you set and forgot. A continuously benchmarked rate is a position you defend — not once, the week you signed, but every week it's in force, against a market the buyer's tools now watch in real time.
So the RFP a hotel fills out this season still buys a relationship with a corporate buyer. What it no longer buys is rest. The old prize was a rate that held untouched until the next cycle; the new one is a seat in a program that keeps score all year. The season looks identical to every season before it. The thing you walk away with does not.
by Markus Busch, Editor/Publisher Hospitality.today
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