🏨 81% say leakage grew or held — and your RFP won't fix it

The growing half of corporate travel skips the RFP.

Egor Travel Code
July 21, 2026

Boarding Call 🚀

RFP season is here. And most programs are about to spend weeks negotiating harder on the 19% of spend that was never the problem — while the other 81% leaks out through a content gap no rate negotiation can reach. This week: where the real lever moved, why the rate you fight for may not be the rate you pay, and what to do before you walk into another hotel negotiation.

📌 This week

RFP season is here, and most programs are about to pour weeks into the same exercise as last year: sit across from hotels, push for a lower fixed rate, lock the number for 2027. It feels like the main lever. It isn't anymore.

New industry analysis this month makes the split hard to ignore: corporate travel now runs on two streams, and only one of them touches an RFP. The negotiated-contract half — big-company, preferred-property, fixed-rate — is flat. The half that's growing is everything that skips the RFP entirely: smaller-company travel, small meetings, hybrid trips, and bookings your travelers make off-channel because the room they wanted wasn't in the tool.

That second half is where the money is leaking out — and no rate negotiation, however sharp, reaches it.

⚡The lever moved — here's where it went

For a decade, "manage travel spend" meant "negotiate better rates." That instinct is now aimed at a shrinking target. Large-corporate bookings have stalled; the growth in managed travel is coming from pulling previously invisible spend into the program, not from shaving another point off a preferred rate.

And the invisible spend is large and sticky. In GBTA's own research, hotel leakage grew or held steady at 81% of programs; air leakage at 67%. Most of it isn't defiance — it traces to a content gap. High headline compliance hides how often a traveler picks a hotel for price, convenience or a loyalty perk the booking tool never showed them. Close the content gap and the leakage closes with it. Keep negotiating harder on the 19% of your spend that was never the problem, and you'll win the rate and lose the program.

Meanwhile the RFP itself is changing shape. Fixed rates still dominate on paper, but the growth is in dynamic and hybrid deals — and buyers are handing the mechanical work to machines: a third of hotel programs used AI in their last sourcing cycle, and roughly seven in ten expect to in the next one. The annual rate exercise is turning into continuous optimization: source, monitor, audit, repeat.

💼 Why It Matters for Corporate Travel

1. Your biggest savings opportunity isn't on the negotiating table — it's off-channel.** With hotel leakage flat-or-growing at 81% of programs and 46% of buyers naming booking-tool content gaps as a top-three headache for 2026, the spend you can't see is now a bigger lever than the rate you can. A program that recaptures even part of its leakage beats one that negotiated a marginally lower fixed rate on the compliant slice.

2. The rate you fight for may not be the rate you pay.** Only 24% of managers expect 2026 negotiated rates to rise more than 5%, yet dynamic-discount programs grew at 49% of companies while fixed-rate increases showed up at just 17%. A fixed number locked in a static RFP can quietly become the worse deal when the market softens. Knowing where static beats dynamic — property by property — is now a data question, not a negotiating-table one.

3. AI is moving from the pitch deck into the sourcing cycle, fast.** Jumping from ~32% to ~69% AI usage in a single cycle is the kind of adoption curve that leaves slow movers benchmarking against peers who already audit rates continuously and catch drift in real time. The human call — traveler preference, brand fit, duty of care — stays human. The rate-checking, leakage-hunting grind is going to the machine.

🛠️ What This Means for Your Travel Program

- Measure your leakage before you measure your rates. Pull the share of hotel and air spend booked off-channel or off-policy this year. That number — not your average negotiated rate — is the headline metric to walk into RFP season with. If you can't produce it, that gap is the finding.
- Close the content gap that pushes people off-channel. Audit what your booking tool actually shows vs. what travelers can find on a consumer site — rates, loyalty perks, the specific property. Travelers leak toward the room they want; put it in the tool and most of them come back on their own.
- Bring the unmanaged edges in — small meetings and long-stay first. These are the fastest-growing, least-governed slices. A light approval path beats no visibility at all, and it converts invisible spend into duty-of-care coverage and negotiating leverage.
- Decide static vs. dynamic property by property — and let AI do the monitoring. For volatile or softening markets, a dynamic or hybrid deal with continuous rate auditing can beat a locked fixed rate. Pilot AI on rate audit and leakage detection this cycle so you're in the 69%, not benchmarking against it next year.

📊 The Numbers

- 81% / 67% — share of travel managers reporting hotel / air leakage grew or stayed the same over the past year. (GBTA, "Achieving the Perfect Business Trip")
- 39% / 46% — buyers naming leakage / booking-tool content gaps among their top operating headaches for 2026. (GBTA, January 2026 poll)
- 32% → 69% — hotel programs that used AI in their most recent sourcing cycle, vs. those expecting to use it in the next one. (GBTA hotel-procurement study with Radisson, 258 managers, surveyed 20 Apr–13 May 2026)
- 49% vs 17% — programs where dynamic-discount rates increased vs. where fixed-rate increases showed up, last cycle; 54% now outsource RFP work partly or fully. (GBTA / Radisson study)
- ~85% / 24% — accepted corporate hotel rates that were still fixed in the last cycle (Cvent), vs. managers who expect 2026 negotiated rates to rise more than 5%. (Cvent; BTN/Cvent 2026 Hotel Survey)

⚡ The Bottom Line

RFP season rewards the instinct to negotiate — but the program that wins in 2027 isn't the one with the lowest fixed rate on its compliant bookings. It's the one that knows how much spend never touched the RFP, closed the content gap feeding the leak, and let AI watch the rates so the team could work the parts that actually move money. The negotiated half is worth defending. It's just not where the growth — or the leak — is anymore. Spend RFP season on the half you can't currently see.

❝

Manage travel. Don’t just book it.

— Egor Karpovich, Co-Founder, Travel Code

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