WEST10

    The question most buyers arrive with

    Should we retender our TMC?

    It is the most common question in corporate travel, and the one most often answered before it has been asked properly.

    Discuss your TMC decision

    The pattern

    You already know how this goes

    Service has slipped. Complaints are reaching people who do not normally complain. The contract is coming up. Procurement wants to know the plan. A tender starts to look like the responsible thing to do.

    Then it takes the best part of a year and consumes time across travel, procurement, IT, security, legal and finance. And very often it ends with the incumbent reappointed on a keener fee. The programme now has the same problems, a thinner service model, and no appetite to look at it again for three years.

    Sometimes a tender is exactly right. But it is worth being sure.

    What a review works through

    Five questions a tender will not answer for you

    • Is the service problem a failure of delivery — or the predictable result of how the account was priced and structured?
    • Is your booking technology failing at the booking — or after it?
    • Are people booking outside the programme because they are ignoring it — or because it does not work where they travel?
    • Which of these problems would still be here with a different TMC?
    • What did your last tender actually change? Most buyers cannot say what one costs them, because nobody counts the hours. But almost everyone can remember what it changed.
    96%
    stayed put.Customer retention at the largest TMC in the world, most recent year.
    2.2×
    retenders vs new wins.CTM defended $1.5bn and won $670m. The tender happened. The supplier stayed.
    9mo
    start to steady state.And 12 to 18 months more before service settles back to where it was.

    What you get

    A written review, not a slide deck

    One document, in plain English, that you can forward to a CFO or a procurement board without explaining it first. It contains:

    • A clear recommendation, with the evidence it rests on
    • The limitations of that evidence stated rather than smoothed over
    • What would change the conclusion
    • An honest list of what could not be established, and what it would take
    • A practical next step — a tender, a renegotiation, or a piece of remedial work
    I built the first online sourcing platform this industry had. I am not against tenders.

    I am against running one before you know what you are trying to fix. Nine months is a long time to spend solving the wrong problem.

    Before you launch your next RFP, talk to me.

    Speak to Karen →