Sometimes it does. But before you act, it is worth understanding how a travel management company actually makes money on your account.
The complaints have a familiar shape. Calls take too long. The agent who knew your programme has gone. Something went wrong out of hours and nobody caught it. Senior people who never normally comment are commenting.
The obvious conclusion is that your TMC has let you down. Occasionally that is exactly what happened, and I will come to how you tell. But service is usually the first thing that gives when the numbers on an account stop working, and those numbers are worth understanding before you decide who is at fault.
Your transaction fee was never the price of the service
It has a specific origin. In February 1995 Delta capped agency commissions, and the rest of the industry followed. By 2002 base commissions had reached zero. Before 1995 fewer than three per cent of agencies charged clients a fee. By 2002 more than ninety-five per cent did.
That fee was not built up from the cost of serving you. It was reverse-engineered, at speed, from what corporates would tolerate, against a cost base still being subsidised from elsewhere.
It still is. The Business Travel Association reports that its TMC members receive, on average, about a third of their income from corporate clients and two thirds from suppliers.
You are negotiating hard over a third of the picture.
You pay per booking. You do not pay per contact.
This is where accounts quietly go underwater.
The fee is earned once, when the booking is made. The work is not. TCG Consulting estimates that thirty to forty per cent of the work agencies do is not transaction-related at all, which means thirty to forty per cent of the labour generates no revenue: account management, ad-hoc reporting, unused ticket tracking, refund chasing, duty of care, policy advice, the data request you needed by Thursday.
Then consider two accounts of identical volume paying an identical fee. One averages 1.4 agent contacts per booking. The other averages 3.5. The second is paying the same and consuming two and a half times the labour.
You can guess which of those two accounts keeps the experienced agents.
None of which is your fault, exactly
Buyers know what good service is worth. In 2020 research, close to 94 per cent of travel buyers said experienced travel consultants were critical, very important or important to them. In the same research, fewer than a quarter expected to pay a higher fee the following year and around 44 per cent said flatly that they would not.
That is not hypocrisy. It is what procurement processes reward. The transaction fee is the one number that compares cleanly across bidders, so it is the number that gets negotiated, while everything that determines whether the service actually works is left to a service level agreement nobody costs.
Four things to establish before you conclude it is a TMC failure
Has the team changed? Compare the team structure sold to you at bid with the one serving you today, and the average tenure of the agents on your account then and now. This is the most direct measure available of whether investment has been withdrawn.
What is your touch ratio? Contacts per booking, by channel and by business unit. Look at the distribution, not the average. A small number of travellers usually generates a wildly disproportionate share of the work.
Is the service you are receiving the service you priced? Dedicated agents, a named team, follow-the-sun cover and a twenty-second answer target all require a minimum volume per head. Below that threshold the sums do not work at any fee you would sign.
Did a fee reduction precede the decline? Plot your fee history and your service performance on one timeline. If abandonment rates rose after the team was restructured following the last negotiation, you have your answer, told in your own data.
When it genuinely is the TMC
Sometimes it is, and I would not want this read as a defence. If your TMC bid knowingly below cost to win the business, that is on them, not on you. If they promised a service model they never resourced, that is a delivery failure and you should hold them to it.
And it may not be service at all. GBTA research in 2025 found 39 per cent of buyers reconsidering their TMC cited dissatisfaction with technology, slightly ahead of the 37 per cent citing service quality. A booking tool that handles the booking well and the trip badly generates a great many phone calls that look like service failures and are not.
The point is not to let anyone off. It is that changing supplier only fixes a problem the supplier caused.
Not sure whether your service problem is a supplier problem?
Sources: GAO reporting on agency commissions; Business Travel Association; TCG Consulting via BTN; GBTA 2025.