The CFO’s guide to running a travel management company RFP

If your current travel management setup limits visibility, delays reconciliation, and allows out-of-policy spend, it’s no longer fit for purpose. Running a structured travel management RFP is how you regain that control.

As business travel spend continues to grow, finance leaders are under increasing pressure to manage it proactively—not after the fact. By 2028, it’s expected to exceed $2.0 trillion, making control and visibility critical priorities. Yet with many traditional TMCs, costs are only visible once they’ve already been incurred, leaving finance to reconcile and explain variances rather than prevent them.

Fragmented reporting. Delayed closes. Out-of-policy spend you can’t recover. If this sounds familiar, your current model isn’t delivering the level of control finance requires. The next step isn’t just switching providers. It’s running a structured evaluation process that ensures your next solution addresses these issues at the root.

Here, we break down how to run a travel management RFP to identify the best solution for your business.

What is a travel management company RFP?

A travel management RFP, or a ‘request for proposal’, is a formal document inviting potential travel management companies or other travel solutions to respond to a specific set of questions. The document helps organisations evaluate different solutions on the market against the same set of requirements, such as policy compliance, service, data management, and technology.

Why traditional TMCs often fail finance

Before defining your RFP criteria, you need a clear view of current gaps in spend control and visibility. With a traditional TMC, there are some consistent problems that crop up:

1. Policy is enforced after the booking

Spend control needs to be proactive, but the TMC setup can allow employees to book travel first and flag exceptions later. By the time they’re flagged, it’s too late, and out-of-policy spend has already happened; you’ve already lost control.

This reactive approach to spend management means finance is auditing travel spend rather than managing it.

2. Manual reconciliation is the norm

Manually reconciling means finance teams gather employee receipts and match each transaction. This is when errors appear, which means more finance team time spent correcting them. It’s a tedious process and an inefficient use of finance resources.

3. Spend visibility is fragmented

With fragmented systems, no one has access to a single source of truth. Data is incomplete and duplicated, real-time analysis is impossible, and closing the books drags on. Budgets can't be enforced proactively because visibility arrives too late.

These aren't isolated inefficiencies. They're symptoms of a structural problem: booking, payment, and reconciliation operate in silos instead of as a unified, controlled process. Without that orchestration, you're managing travel admin, not travel spend.

Key components of a TMC RFP

You need your vendors to respond to your RFP with useful information that provides a consistent basis for comparing solutions. You’ll want to avoid general proposals that add no real value.

Company overview and travel profile

Include the size of your organisation, how many travelling employees you have, types of trips they take, i.e. domestic, international, and roughly how much you spend on travel each year.

Other details to include if you can:

• How far in advance you book trips
• Common routes
• Trips that involve multiple travellers
• Any business requirements unique to your company, such as support for multiple entities with different travel policies

Technology

Ask specific questions to get specific answers.

• User interface and mobile capabilities. Can your employees book, change, and manage trips from a mobile app? And how intuitive is the interface? Employee adoption speed will directly impact operational efficiency and ROI.
• Policy compliance features. Is policy enforced at the point of booking, or do you flag exceptions after?
• Integrations. Can you connect your specific ERP and accounting systems? Or do they rely on non-native integrations? Can you access real-time data synchronisation or batch exports?
• Virtual cards. Can you instantly set up virtual cards tied to individual trips, set limits, and automatically deactivate after the trip?
• AI capabilities. Can the system automate approvals and provide budget alerts? Do you have access to an AI travel agent to ensure all bookings remain in policy?

Service and support

Find out how you can access support, whether through chat or email. And what kind of response times are you looking at? When employees are travelling, it’s important that they can contact someone 24/7. Ask what the onboarding process looks like and whether you have access to a dedicated account manager.

Financials and data

You need to know that once you go live, you’ll have full visibility and control over your spend data. So ask the vendor what data they can provide you with and whether you can access it through real-time dashboards.

Pricing

You don’t just want the monthly platform fee; you need to know about all associated costs. From the cost of implementation, to per-transaction fees, additional user costs, or entities, card volume, user seats, etc.

Six steps to a successful RFP process

Step one: Before you start, define your requirements

You need to define what a better solution than your current one could do for the company. And that means including all relevant departments (consider including procurement, finance, HR, IT, and frequent travellers) in the initial stages to understand what success looks like. What are you missing with your current TMC? What do you need to integrate into it?

Step two: Analyse your spending data

Analyse historical spend data including spending patterns, average trip costs, late bookings, and out-of-pocket business travel expenses to help you inform your requirements. Sharing this data also helps you give all vendors the same baseline, making it easier to compare like-for-like.

Step three: Make a shortlist of vendors

It’s easy to gravitate towards the known market leaders, but don’t just consider the ones you’ve heard of. Look at traditional TMCs, expense tools, and all-in-one spend management solutions.

Step four: Draft your RFP

Use the key components in the previous section to help you structure your RFP. Remember, don’t include generic questions as they only give you generic answers, and you need answers specifically relevant to your organisation; otherwise, responses won’t be actionable.

Don’t forget to include a submission deadline so you will have all your information ready to make an informed decision.

Step five: Evaluate your options and select

Make sure you’re consistent with the way you score vendors. Take advantage of free trials or product demos to analyse the booking process and scroll through the reporting dashboards. TMC migrations are time-consuming and expensive, so treat evaluation like due diligence.

Consider contacting customers of the TMCs you’re considering, particularly if they’re a similar size to your organisation. Ask them all your burning questions, do they have any reservations, etc.?

Step six: Build an implementation plan

Implementing a new TMC affects many departments, and, of course, the travellers themselves, so make sure implementation is as smooth as possible for everyone involved. That means planning your data migration, integrating the system, configuring policies, and communicating with employees. Set milestones so everyone (including the vendor) is working toward the same goal.

Payhawk: a modern alternative to a TMC

Travel spend shouldn’t be managed across disconnected steps. Instead, it should operate as a single, controlled flow. Booking, payment, and reconciliation need to be fully aligned, with policy enforced at the point of spend, not after the fact. That’s exactly what Payhawk delivers. It brings the entire travel spend flow into one system with full control and visibility in real time. This means less manual coordination for finance teams and an AI-native way to manage business trips from start to finish.

• You can issue virtual cards per trip, and define limits in advance
• You can see spend in real-time
• Reconciliation is automatic
• Everything connects to your accounting system, so no surprises at month-end
• You can automate booking and enforce policy with an AI agent built into your workflow

Remember, don’t rush the process. Changing TMCs isn’t something you can easily reverse, so just take your time, involve the right people early on, and don’t focus too much on pricing. You shouldn’t be seeking the cheapest solution, but instead the one that delivers the most value and supports scalable, controlled growth without increasing operational complexity.

If you’re looking for a solution that gives finance total control over one of the least predictable areas of spend, book a demo with Payhawk, and we’ll show you exactly what we can deliver.