Your travel RFP is measuring the wrong things
The way companies choose a travel partner is built to reward the wrong qualities, and most buyers never question it.
I’ve been on the receiving end of a lot of travel RFPs. The request for proposal, the formal document a company sends out when it wants to pick a travel provider. And I’ve come to believe the process itself is quietly broken, in a way that hurts the very companies running it.
Here’s what usually happens. A company decides to shop for a new travel partner. Procurement builds a spreadsheet with a few hundred questions, most of them inherited from the last time they ran the process, which was inherited from the time before that. Vendors fill in the boxes. The scores get tallied. And the contract tends to go to whoever answered the most boxes with a yes, not to whoever would actually run the best program.
The problem isn’t that RFPs exist. Some structure is better than none. The problem is what they measure.
Counting features instead of outcomes
Most travel RFPs are feature checklists. Does your tool do this? Can it integrate with that? Do you support this obscure edge case someone hit once in 2019 and wrote into the template forever?
A vendor who checks every box looks strong on paper. But a yes in a spreadsheet tells you almost nothing about whether the thing works well, whether travelers will actually use it, or whether support picks up the phone at two in the morning when a trip falls apart. The RFP rewards breadth of features. It says very little about depth of execution. And execution is the entire game.
I’ve watched companies choose the vendor with the longest feature list and end up with a program nobody wanted to use. The boxes were all ticked. The travelers still booked around the tool, because it was painful, because support was slow, because the thing that looked complete on paper was miserable in practice.
The questions that never make the list
What’s striking is what these documents leave out.
They rarely ask what happens when something goes wrong, which is the moment that actually defines a travel program. A flight gets cancelled at midnight, a hotel walks a guest, someone’s stranded in a city where they don’t speak the language. That’s when you find out what a provider is made of. Almost no RFP probes it seriously.
They rarely ask about the traveler’s experience, even though traveler adoption is what determines whether any of the promised savings ever materialize. A program the traveler avoids is a program that saves nothing, no matter how the contract reads.
And they rarely ask the provider to prove anything. A vendor can claim a capability, tick the box, and never be asked to show it live. The demo, when there is one, is scripted. The hard question, the one that would expose the gap between the claim and the reality, tends not to get asked.
Why the process resists change
If the process is this flawed, why does it survive? A few reasons, and none of them are anybody’s fault exactly.
Procurement teams are measured on running a defensible process, not on the outcome two years later. A spreadsheet with scores is defensible. It produces a clear winner, an audit trail, a number to point at. Judgment is harder to defend, even when judgment would pick the better partner.
The templates get copied forward because rebuilding one from scratch is real work, and the person inheriting it usually assumes the questions are there for a reason. So the 2019 edge case lives on, and the questions that would actually matter never get added, because nobody has the time or the mandate to rethink the whole thing.
And vendors, honestly, have learned to play the game. We know how to answer the boxes. The whole industry has optimized around producing yeses, which means the document measures how good a vendor is at filling out documents, a skill with almost no relationship to running a good program.
A better way to choose
If I were buying travel today, I’d throw out most of the checklist and ask a smaller number of harder questions.
I’d ask the provider to walk me through the last three times a trip went badly for one of their clients, in detail, including what broke and how they handled it. I’d want to talk to a traveler who uses the tool every week, not the executive who signed the contract. I’d ask to see the thing work live, with an unscripted scenario I brought myself. And I’d weigh how the provider handles the messy, unglamorous middle of a program far more heavily than how many features they can list.
The goal of an RFP shouldn’t be to find the vendor who says yes the most. It should be to find the one who will still be answering the phone when everything else has gone wrong. Those are rarely the same vendor, and the current process is very good at telling them apart in exactly the wrong direction.
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.