Kevin O’Malley recently joined Will Pinnell, Senior Vice President of the Americas at HRS, on the Corporate Insights podcast for a conversation about where managed travel is heading. Drawing on 32 years in the industry, Kevin walked through the trends that buyers and TMCs are working hardest to make sense of right now. Here are the themes that stood out.
The pace of change keeps accelerating
After three decades that span the era before online booking tools, Kevin has watched the industry reinvent itself many times over. One thing has held steady.
“The one thing that’s been consistent is change,” he said. “Constant change in this space, and that continues.”
The difference today is speed. “There’s always been change in this industry, but I think the speed of change has picked up even more pace.” For buyers, that creates a real challenge: deciding what to pay attention to, what to ignore, and how to interpret a market that shifts by the day.
Convergence and the rise of “dealerships”
NDC dominated industry conversations for years. Kevin sees that noise quieting, with attention moving to the convergence reshaping managed travel.
Kevin describes the result as a set of emerging “dealerships.”
“We kind of see dealerships, if you will, popping up,” he said. “Call GBT Concur a dealership. Call Flight Centre, Kayak for Business, a dealership.”
The open question for buyers is whether they want booking, payment, and expense fully integrated into a single closed solution, or a more open approach. As Kevin put it, “One’s not right and one’s not wrong, they’re just different.” Smaller and mid-sized TMCs, meanwhile, face their own decision about whether to join one of these groups.
AI is coming fast, but adoption is slow
Kevin was candid about the gap between AI hype and reality. On a corporate advisory board call with New M.O.’s buyer group the same day, he asked whether AI had reached their programs in practice. The answer was “not so much. It’s more talk at this point.”
That does not mean buyers are sitting still. Many are already using AI to manage their programs, consolidating data, analyzing RFPs, and distilling reports. Inside TMCs, the early focus has been behind the scenes, making agents more efficient given that roughly 70% of a TMC’s cost is people.
Kevin sees emergency after-hours service and self-serve booking as areas ripe for AI to make a practical difference. His overall read: “AI is coming fast,” but “it’s gonna take a bit of time to play in.”
Fintech money is flooding the space
Some of the biggest shifts are coming from payment and fintech players moving from the periphery straight into the middle of managed travel. Kevin noted Brex selling for over five billion dollars, Center going to Amex, and major moves by JPMorgan Chase and Capital One.
What’s driving it is the same convergence of booking, payment, and expense, especially in the SME segment. For banks built around credit cards, the calculation is different. They may not need to make money on travel itself if travel builds loyalty to the card.
“It’s putting a lot more big money into the travel space,” Kevin said, adding that the industry is “kind of at the tip of the iceberg.”
The return of small meetings
Even as virtual platforms became routine, Kevin sees more small, in-person meetings, driven by distributed teams and a renewed appreciation for being together.
“Nothing replaces human interaction face to face,” he said. Leaders worried about culture and connection have made it easier to get permission for these gatherings.
Where New M.O. fits
Across every theme, the common thread is buyers being asked to do more with less while their remit keeps expanding into payments, duty of care, and meetings. That is where New M.O. aims to help.
“We don’t bring all the answers into the room,” Kevin said. “We don’t have silver bullets, but we do bring perspective.”
That independent perspective, grounded in decades across the ecosystem, is what New M.O. brings to a market that, by Kevin’s own description, is “a challenging and confusing time for many.”
You can listen to the full conversation on the Corporate Insights podcast, hosted by Will Pinnell of HRS, on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
