TMCs and the art of reinvention.
A guest post in The Beat by Kevin O’Malley.
New M.O.’s Kevin O’Malley has a guest article published in The Beat today, drawing a line from David Bowie’s career of reinvention to managed travel’s decades-long search for the right words to describe itself.
In the article, Kevin traces the industry’s habit of renaming: business travel agents became TMCs, CRSs became GDSs, and booking tools now position themselves as marketplaces and retailing ecosystems. The catalyst for the piece was Navan’s customer conference in New York, where a company that once predicted the end of “legacy” TMCs confidently referred to itself as a travel agency.
Kevin makes the case that managed travel suffers slightly from its own success. When flights, hotels, payments, policy controls, traveler safety, and reporting all work together seamlessly, the operational sophistication behind it becomes invisible, and easy for investors, travelers, and new entrants to underestimate. He also argues that AI, rather than diminishing the concept of agency, will likely strengthen it as complexity across the ecosystem intensifies.
His closing point borrows one more lesson from Bowie: reinvention only works when there is genuine substance underneath, and this industry has plenty of it.
Read the full article at The Beat (no subscription required).
