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TMC competition a boon to cos. hit hard by air, hotel changes.

Article Excerpt
It is clear that small and midmarket companies make up a significant and often-overlooked portion of the total business travel market which, by many accounts, has been, and will continue to be, hit the hardest by widespread industry change. Ongoing airfare restructuring and soaring hotel rates seem to have left midmarket travel managers between a rock and a hard place when it comes to vendor negotiations, but fierce competition for midmarket money in the travel management company space conversely has given buyers the upper hand at the bargaining table.

"The characteristics of that midmarket are changing, and it's important to look at what part of the total travel market that segment represents," said Norm Rose, president of Belmont, Calif.-based Travel Tech Consulting. "I would guess that it's probably 50 percent of the total market at least. It's a really big space and it's not homogenous. The higher end is looking more like the bigger market, and the lower end is probably looking like the small market."

While BTN's metrics for segmenting the small and midmarket have remained constant over the past few years--the former maintaining less than $2 million in U.S. booked air travel, the latter buying $2 million to $12 million--the market has been in tremendous flux, calling into question long-held assumptions about...

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