NEW YORK — The Q3 2026 corporate-travel RFP window opens within weeks, and the 2027 program kickoffs sitting at the end of that pipeline are landing into a TMC market that has materially recomposed in the last twelve months. The headline structural change is the closing of Amex GBT’s acquisition of CWT on September 2, 2025, which compresses the global-scale TMC set from three to two: Amex GBT, now CWT-inclusive, and BCD Travel. FCM Travel Solutions, CTM and Reed & Mackay hold the tier-two positioning with credible global capability, and they are competing harder for accounts that want a non-Amex-GBT, non-BCD setup for vendor-diversity reasons.
The competitive temperature inside the tier-two cohort is the operational read travel managers should be carrying into the requirements-drafting phase. FCM is leading on the NDC-certification piece with IATA NDC Level 4 — the top tier of IATA’s certification ladder — and is positioning the certification as a procurement-side leverage point. BCD Travel runs the NDC FastTrack program, a cross-industry initiative that has expanded to include FCM, CTM, Fox World Travel, Amadeus and Travelport. BCD has separately moved on direct-airline content with an expanded American Airlines integration, framing the move as part of its NDC-transformation push.
NDC Crosses Into Requirements
The single largest change in the 2027 RFP requirements packet versus the 2024 or 2025 cycles is that NDC content access and continuous pricing have crossed from optional-capability slide into required-section line items. The question is no longer whether the TMC can access NDC content. The question is which carriers’ NDC content is in production, what the latency on offer-and-order servicing is, how negotiated corporate fares get reconciled against continuous-pricing offers, and what the audit trail looks like when those reconciliations produce a non-trivial delta.
Corporate NDC adoption industry-wide sits at roughly 6%, versus roughly 16% in leisure travel. Concur cleared its one-millionth NDC booking in Q1 2026 and has guided to two million bookings within five months on the current trajectory. The pace is meaningful, but the headline 6% number is the data point buyers are using to push back on supplier-side optimism about NDC’s near-term role in their programs.
The continuous-pricing piece is the harder operational question. Continuous pricing — the carrier-side capability to price an offer dynamically in response to demand signals rather than from a fixed published-fare ladder — produces offers that may sit above or below a negotiated corporate fare on the same itinerary. For program owners, the policy question is what gets booked when continuous pricing produces a lower offer than the contracted rate, and what gets booked when it produces a higher one. Most TMCs are now able to handle the case where continuous pricing beats the corporate rate; the case where it does not is the one where buyer-side policy specificity has to do the work.
The Carrier-Direct Hold-Back Pattern
The carrier-direct corporate-deal hold-back pattern is the under-the-surface dynamic shaping the NDC conversation. Several major carriers — particularly on the US trio of Delta, United and American on one side, and the European majors of Lufthansa Group, Air France-KLM and IAG on the other — have been holding back specific NDC content and corporate-fare offers from GDS channels and surfacing them only through direct corporate-deal portals or NDC-certified TMC routes.
For buyers, the effect is content fragmentation. The same itinerary may appear with different offers, different ancillary inclusions, and different fare-rule packaging depending on whether it is sourced through the GDS, through the carrier’s NDC pipe, or through a carrier-direct corporate portal. The fragmentation is the leading operational reason NDC-readiness questions have moved up the RFP requirements stack — buyers need TMCs that can aggregate across the fragmented sources and surface a normalized view in the OBT.
The Continuous Pricing Question In The Requirements Section
The continuous-pricing section of the 2027 RFP is where most program owners are spending their drafting time. The standard new question set runs:
- Which carriers’ continuous-pricing offers are surfaced in the OBT today?
- What is the latency between offer issuance and OBT display?
- How are corporate-fare contracts reconciled against continuous-pricing offers at the point of search?
- What is the policy-engine handling when continuous pricing produces a lower offer than the contracted rate?
- What is the policy-engine handling when continuous pricing produces a higher offer than the contracted rate, and the traveler still wants to book it?
- What is the post-booking servicing model for continuous-pricing offers — particularly on exchange, refund and ancillary modification?
The depth of those answers is where TMCs are differentiating in 2027 cycles. The compressed Amex GBT–BCD competitive set at scale, plus the tier-two cohort competing on certification and direct-content access, means buyers are getting more substantive answers to the continuous-pricing question than in any prior cycle.
What To Build Into 2027 Requirements
Three working drafting recommendations for travel managers writing Q3 2026 RFPs.
First, treat NDC content access and continuous-pricing handling as required sections, not as appendix capability checks. The market is now mature enough that supplier responses can be evaluated comparatively rather than as binary yes/no claims.
Second, scope a duty-of-care and traveler-tracking requirements block that explicitly addresses the visa and entry-friction agenda GBTA’s outlook poll has been flagging — 65% of buyers cited entry/exit and visa friction as a top-three concern. Build the supplier-side capability question into the RFP rather than assuming it.
Third, write contract language that survives ownership transitions. The Long Lake Management proposed acquisition of Amex GBT is the immediate case, but the broader read is that the TMC market has been in active M&A motion for two years and 2027 contracts will likely span at least one more ownership-side event. Service-level guarantees, transition provisions and governance-review cadence are the contract sections that need the most attention in that environment.
The Q3 2026 RFP window is where the 2027 program structure gets locked in. The TMC market behind that window is materially more compressed, more NDC-mature, and more M&A-active than it was two cycles ago. The requirements packets reflecting those changes are the ones that will produce the strongest 2027 programs.