The payment problem hiding in plain sight in every travel program
The tools to fix how companies pay for travel have existed for twenty years. The strange part is how few of them use it.
A few weeks ago I sat in a room with two directors of a large business group. One ran facilities, the other HR. The company was twenty-five years old, held more than twenty operating companies, and spent north of eighteen million dollars a year moving its people around. Serious operation, serious people.
At some point I asked them something simple. Why weren’t their travel payments running on the corporate payment tools their own bank already offered?
They looked at me like I’d switched languages. They had no idea those tools existed. So I walked them through it: what corporate travel payment products are, how they work, what they cost, which is usually nothing, and what they’d do to the mountain of admin their teams were hauling around every month. Before we’d even finished, one of them was on the phone with his account manager at the bank, asking for virtual cards to centralize the payment of flights and hotels.
Eighteen million dollars a year, and the fix had been sitting at their own bank the whole time.
A solved problem nobody told the buyers about
I’ve started to think this is the real payments story in corporate travel, and it isn’t the one the industry likes to tell. We talk about payment as if it were some frontier we’re all racing toward. It’s stranger than that. The technology already exists, it’s mature, it’s been proven for years, and a lot of the market, including big, sophisticated companies, just doesn’t know it’s there.
Let me be concrete, because the value isn’t abstract.
What these tools kill is reconciliation. The usual setup goes like this: a supplier charges someone’s card, a receipt turns up somewhere, an expense report gets filed weeks later, and finance spends the end of every month piecing together what happened by hand. The traveler floats the company’s cash while all that plays out. Every step leaks time and data.
The tools collapse it. You get one monthly invoice instead of a scatter of charges, flights and hotels paid centrally, and reconciliation that just happens, because a virtual card is tied to a single booking. What got approved is what gets charged, with the merchant and amount and category already stitched on.
And none of it is experimental. Banks have sold this for years.
So why doesn’t anyone use it
Here’s the part I keep chewing on. If it’s free, and it works, and it’s already at the company’s bank, how does an eighteen-million-dollar program go years without touching it?
Three things pile up, I think.
One, the banks and providers are quiet about these products. Almost no presence in the rooms where travel and finance people actually swap notes. Little noise, little sales energy pointed at the people who’d gain the most.
Two, the product itself froze in time. These cards work more or less the way they did in the early 2000s, and when something stops evolving, there’s nothing fresh to say about it, nothing to make a buyer look twice.
Three, and this is the delicate one, travel managers get squeezed harder every year to prove efficiency, but the money side of their own programs usually isn’t where their strength lies. You can’t hunt for something you don’t know is there. No shame in that. It’s true of anyone standing in front of a tool nobody bothered to show them.
Stack those three up and you get a product that fits the market almost perfectly and still goes largely unused. And it isn’t only the buyers who lose. Suppliers and agencies lose too, because cleaner payment is better for everybody in the chain.
The reaction tells you everything
When I walk a company through this, I almost always get the same reaction I got in that room. Surprise. It’s a little like telling someone the happy ending of a Greek tragedy. They’re floored, mostly because they didn’t know the thing existed, what it does, how you sign up, or that it tends to cost nothing.
There’s an opening in that surprise, for whoever’s willing to be the one explaining it. The company walks out having learned something and having solved a real headache. That’s value you get to hand over before you ever try to sell anything.
Where this actually goes
Pull back, and the payment problem isn’t really about technology. The technology is finished. What’s missing is that people don’t know it’s finished. Buyers don’t know these tools exist, and the people who make them haven’t done much to fix that.
If you run a travel program, the move is almost too simple. Ask your bank which corporate travel payment tools you already have sitting on the shelf. Good chance the answer surprises you, and a good chance it’s free to start. One invoice, automatic reconciliation, flights and hotels paid centrally. Now, not someday.
For those of us who build in this business, the work in front of us has nothing to do with inventing anything. It’s closing the gap between a solution that already works and the people who’d be better off with it. We got very good at helping companies pick a trip. We’ve barely started helping them figure out how to pay for it.
About me
I am an entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience at the intersection of tourism and technology. I am co-founder and Chief Business Officer of VOLL, the largest mobile-first corporate travel and expense management platform in Latin America, and a recognized reference in the development of the corporate travel industry.
A Marketing specialist from Fundação Dom Cabral, I serve on the Tourism Council of FecomércioSP and on the Executive Council of the Latin American Association of Corporate Events and Travel Management (Alagev). A frequent traveler and close observer of human behavior in motion, I write and speak about innovation, digital transformation, entrepreneurial leadership, and the future of corporate travel.