The Corporate Buyer’s Dilemma

The perception

It's easy to assume that "cutting out the middleman" must make corporate travel cheaper. If you connect directly to the airline, surely you avoid extra costs? Some airlines have leaned on that perception, suggesting the lowest fares can only be found through direct connections.

The reality

Airline websites and APIs are designed to maximize yield for the individual airline, not minimize cost for the buyer. They may show only certain itineraries, exclude cheaper combinations of fares, or restrict which carriers can be ticketed together.

How modern marketplaces uncover hidden value

A marketplace model looks at all available fares and constructs itineraries in ways that airline.com doesn't:

• Split tickets: Sometimes two one-way tickets are cheaper than a single roundtrip. Airlines often don't surface these, but marketplaces do.
• Combinable fares: A flight on Airline A outbound and Airline B inbound may cost less than staying with one carrier both ways. Marketplaces can build these options, while many airline sites cannot or will not.
• Validating carriers: Some routes allow tickets to be issued on different carriers' ticket stock. Choosing a different validating carrier can unlock lower fares. Airlines rarely show these alternatives, but marketplaces include them.
• Sum of locals: For connecting markets, pricing each leg separately can be cheaper than the through fare. Marketplaces run these calculations automatically.
• Mix and Match: As NDC adoption grows, marketplaces can still combine NDC and EDIFACT offers, or even mix multiple NDC offers, on a single itinerary to give corporates maximum flexibility.

These aren't edge cases - they're frequent scenarios in corporate travel, where itineraries are complex and fares change constantly.

What the benchmarks show

Sabre's benchmark analysis in June 2025 representing over 117 million bookings across top U.S. airlines supports the point:

• SabreMosaic Marketplace Fares were lower than airline.com in 41% of cases.
• They were equal most of the rest of the time.
• Only a tiny fraction of searches produced higher fares.

Marketplace vs. airline.com^*

Why this matters to corporates

For CFOs, travel managers and procurement leaders, savings are not about headlines - they're about program-level value:

• Consistent visibility: Marketplaces maximise visibility so TMCs can surface the best possible options for buyers, wherever the offers come from. This gives corporates confidence that their travellers are seeing the full picture, without having to manage the complexity themselves.
• Policy compliance: When travelers believe they can find cheaper fares outside the program, leakage increases. Marketplaces reduce that perception by showing the full picture inside the approved channels.
• Total trip cost: A flight is rarely booked in isolation. Marketplaces bundle flights with hotels, ancillaries, and ground in one view, allowing corporates to control the whole trip cost, not just the airfare.

More than 80% of agencies said unified access through a single platform would reduce costs

Survey insight

Unified access drives efficiency

Sabre's global fragmentation survey confirmed this. More than 80% of agencies said unified access through a single platform would reduce costs. That's because managing multiple direct pipes adds overhead - both for TMCs and corporates. Consolidation lowers admin costs, improves compliance, and strengthens control.

Servicing as part of the value equation

In corporate travel, saving money isn't just about finding the lowest fare. It's about managing the total cost of servicing. A booking that looks cheap up front can become expensive if it can't be changed or cancelled easily.

This is where direct connects often fall short. Each airline builds servicing differently, so some changes can be handled online while others require manual intervention. For corporates, that means more time lost and more frustrated travellers, and for TMCs that means higher agent handling costs.

The bottom line for corporates

Direct connects may sound like a cost-saving shortcut, but the evidence shows otherwise. They are optimized for airline yield, not corporate savings.

Marketplaces, by contrast, are built to deliver value at the program level. They:

• Surface cheaper itineraries airlines don't show.
• Provides competitive pricing that consistently matches or improves on airline direct connect offers.
• Consolidate data to strengthen negotiations and compliance.
• Consistent levels of service quality.
• Bundle flights with hotels, ancillaries, and ground to show the true cost of travel.

For a corporate buyer, this isn't about distribution plumbing. It's about confidence that your program is extracting the best possible value - consistently, across all suppliers, all channels, and all travelers.

The perception

Some airlines claim their direct NDC APIs provide better content than what's available through other NDC channels. From a buyer's perspective, that can sound logical: plug in directly, and nothing gets lost in translation.

The reality

One API connects you to one airline. To replicate a complete market view, a TMC would need to support dozens of separate airline connections. Each comes with its own technical setup, commercial rules, and servicing challenges.

That patchwork doesn't just make life harder for TMCs. It also affects corporates. Travelers may not see all the fares available, managers may lose visibility across suppliers, and corporates may miss opportunities to optimise spend.

Benchmarks and coverage

Sabre's analysis, from June 2025, of a sample representing over 117m annual Sabre bookings showed that marketplace fares were the same or lower than airline.com 99 percent of the time, with 41 percent of cases coming in lower. More importantly, the majority of this content is covered by long-term parity agreements between airlines and the marketplace. That ensures the fares and availability shown on airline sites are also visible through TMC channels - giving corporates confidence they aren't missing out.

Fragmentation as the underlying driver

Corporate buyers may not think much about "fragmentation" as a concept. To them, it sounds like a TMC issue. But the survey shows fragmentation has real downstream effects:

• 91% of agencies said they already juggle four or more booking systems.
• More than half said they manage seven or more systems.
• 75% said the number of connections has grown in the past three years.

of agencies said they already juggle four or more booking systems.

More than half said they manage seven or more systems.

said the number of connections has grown in the past three years.

Why corporates should care

You don't need to know the technical details of EDIFACT, NDC, or APIs to see the impact. If your travellers aren't seeing all the fares, if your managers can't trust the data, and if your program is leaving money on the table, that's a corporate problem.

The bottom line: direct connects may promise more content, but the data shows they deliver less.

The perception

Airlines often promote direct connects as the "modern" way to access their content. They highlight ancillaries, richer seat maps, and bundles that older systems can't always display. To a corporate buyer, it can sound like a leap forward.

The reality

The truth is more nuanced. The older standard, EDIFACT, has served the industry for decades but was never designed for today's retailing. It handles basic fares well, but it struggles with richer content - branded fare families, visuals, bundles, ancillaries.

That's why IATA created NDC - a new standard to support modern airline retailing. Sabre has invested heavily in this, delivering NDC content across its Marketplace, alongside EDIFACT and low-cost carrier fares. Buyers can already see these offers - and compare them - across OBTs, TMCs, mobile apps, and websites.

By contrast, direct connects sit outside that standard. Each airline implements their own connection in their own way, with no common rules. For corporates, that creates a problem: the same traveler can have a completely different booking experience from one carrier to the next.

Why corporates feel it more than leisure travelers

For leisure travelers, an inconsistent booking flow may be an irritation. For corporates, it's a liability. Business trips often involve multiple airlines, hotels, cars, and last-minute changes. A trip can shift in hours - a client cancels a meeting, a flight gets disrupted, an employee needs to re-route.

If each piece of the journey is handled in a different system, servicing becomes complicated and slow. Some direct connects allow changes online, others don't. Some sync back to the TMC, others break the workflow. The result: travelers stranded without support, managers blind to changes, and companies exposed on duty of care.

That's why consistency matters more in corporate travel than anywhere else. Travelers need confidence they'll be supported across every channel - online booking tool, TMC, mobile app, and even at the airport.

Why corporates should care

NDC is a positive step - and Sabre supports it by bringing it into the Marketplace, alongside EDIFACT and low-cost carrier (LCC) content. That means corporates don't miss out on modern features, and they can see those options consistently across all their channels.

The challenge comes from direct connects that exist in a silo. They fragment the experience, make servicing harder, and force corporates into patchwork solutions that don't scale.

Modernization isn't about stitching together dozens of pipes. It's about ensuring every traveler sees the best options in one place - and every manager can trust the data behind them.

The perception

Airlines are promoting their "direct connects" as being ready for the future. The argument is that by tying into their new Offer and Order systems, corporates will have a future-proof setup.

The reality

Offer and Order is the next major industry shift - IATA is targeting 100% adoption by 2030. The change will mean airlines can move beyond legacy tickets and booking codes to retail travel more flexibly, in bundles of flights, ancillaries, and services. But making this vision work at scale is the real challenge. Business travel generates huge volumes of searches and bookings, and as new bundles of offers and orders go into the shopping basket, systems need to process them instantly, securely, and reliably. That is where scale matters.

Today Sabre handles hundreds of transactions every second, and as volumes rise further, our cloud-native platform is built to keep pace - without travel managers or TMCs having to compromise on speed, service, or duty of care.

The bigger issue: access

When airlines worry about too many searches compared to actual bookings, they sometimes put limits on what results get shown - called "look to book ratios". In practice, this means a traveller searching through their booking tool may not see all the fares that are actually available, simply because the airline decided there had been "too much looking." With generative AI multiplying search traffic, this issue will only become more common.

For corporates, the knock-on impact is clear: missed fares, higher costs, and a loss of trust that the program is showing the full picture. Platforms built for scale protect against this by keeping content flowing without restrictions, so corporates and travellers always see what's really there.

A different path

What corporates need isn't dozens of one-off airline links. They need a path that scales with the industry - one that can handle rising volumes without throttling, and distribute new airline features consistently across the board.

This is where Sabre's unique position matters. We're one of the few players working across both sides of the equation: building a fast-growing Offer and Order platform for airlines, while also connecting suppliers to agencies and TMCs through our Marketplace. That dual perspective gives us a clear view of how changes in airline retailing translate into the corporate world - and how to make sure corporates and their travellers benefit from them.

This isn't just theory.The world's largest TMCs already rely on Sabre as their backbone. New entrants like Spotnana and Navan do too, scaling their ambitions on the same cloud-native, AI-driven platform. At enterprise scale, change can be supported once and delivered everywhere - rather than rebuilt airline by airline.

Why this matters to corporates

For a corporate travel manager or CFO, this comes down to three things:

• Consistency: New airline features arrive in a way that works across your whole program, not just in isolated cases.
• Resilience: Your travellers won't suddenly lose visibility because of throttling or mismatched pipes.
• Influence: By being part of a platform that powers the largest global TMCs, you're not beholden to a single airline's roadmap. Instead, you're aligned with the direction of the whole industry.

In short: direct connects may seem "future-ready," but they tie you to one airline's version of the future. Platforms built at industry scale ensure corporates are ready for everyone's future - with consistency, access, and control intact.