Back when COVID hit, I was lecturing and doing PhD research. Work moved fully online, so I thought nothing was stopping me from working abroad.
And while travel prices plummeted in the heart of the pandemic, they skyrocketed as soon as things started to open up again.
Just because work stayed flexible didn’t mean it was at all affordable to book an Airbnb for a month in France.
So, I started wondering why travel was still so expensive (both for leisure and business). More and more companies have emerged promising innovative travel booking solutions, but most of the upgrades amount to facelifts on old processes with slightly more modern UI/UX.
The real problem remains the decades-old cost structures that make help make travel so expensive.
We started Roamr to flip that economic model.
The quiet misalignment in travel software incentives nobody talks about
Corporate travel platforms aren’t incentivized to help you save money.
All the big players you know make money by taking a commission from hotel partners on every booking. The percentages vary, but it’s usually between 4% and 12% of the nightly rate at the time of booking.
That means their revenue goes up when your company spends more. A bigger hotel bill isn’t a problem for them. It’s profit.
One finance leader told me about a company on-site they were hosting that required a portion of the team to travel from the U.S. to India. When they booked through their travel platform, the quote came in at around $17,000 — per person.
That surprising price sent them looking for different options. And they found they could make the same exact booking directly at $4,500 per person.
That’s an extreme example where the nuance comes down to lead times, policy constraints, and room requirements. But it shines a light on how misaligned the incentives are. Inside that $12,500 difference are commissions, margin sharing, and so-called “volume discounts” that sound great in theory. But do they hold up in practice?
You see variations of that extreme example all the time:
- Surge pricing when you book for mega conferences like Dreamforce
- Limited availability and higher prices when major concerts and events are taking place near your gathering
- Expensive bookings during peak consumer travel seasons
The difference between booking direct and booking through your travel platform often flies under the radar. Fifty dollars here, a hundred there, doesn’t raise flags until you add it across hundreds of trips.
But the system reinforces itself. Finance teams like the automation corporate travel software offers. Employees like the convenient UX. Vendors show reports that look efficient. Beneath all that polish, the same misalignment remains: the only party guaranteed to profit is the one taking a cut of every dollar you spend.
How we’re flipping the economics of corporate travel management
Corporate travel software doesn’t need a design overhaul. It needs an economic one.
For years, travel platforms have treated efficiency as an add-on instead of the foundation of their model. They’ve made booking simpler and expense reporting faster, but the way money moves hasn’t changed. As long as vendors earn a percentage of total spend, the system will always drift toward higher costs.
Fixing that means starting with the basics: who benefits when value is created, and who pays when it’s wasted. Once those lines are clear, efficiency stops being a feature of the product and becomes the purpose of it.
At Roamr, that shift comes down to three ideas that reshape how value moves through corporate travel.
1. Earn from savings, not spend
The first step is to realign how value moves through the system. Most travel vendors still earn a percentage of total spend, which means higher costs translate directly into higher revenue. That structure might be efficient for suppliers, but it doesn’t create aligned outcomes.
We built Roamr around the opposite idea. We earn only on proven savings. Our share comes from the money a company keeps, not the money it spends.
That change shifts the focus from transactions to results. When everyone benefits from efficiency, the advice and insights a platform provides start to carry real weight. The economics themselves keep both sides accountable.
2. Make the margin transparent
The second shift is visibility. In most travel systems, money moves in ways no one can see. Finance teams know there are commissions baked into rates but can’t tell how much or where they go. That opacity is what allows the misalignment to persist.
Transparency changes that. When everyone understands how value moves — what the company saves, what travelers earn, what the partner keeps — trust stops being a matter of faith and becomes part of the structure.
We’re helping companies maintain that transparency with Roamr. We pay your employees to stay with their friends on work trips, redistributing your hotel spend so everyone wins. This is how the margins work for all involved:
- The company saves 30%. We look at market averages or your own policy rates to set this discount. The savings go straight to your bottom line.
- The traveler earns 30%. Employees are rewarded for choosing this cost-efficient option.
- The host earns 30%. Value flows to the people who make travel possible.
- Roamr keeps 10%. A fixed, transparent share that exists only when savings are realized.
This is what it means to flip the economics of business travel software. Not all your employees will want to stay with friends when traveling. But for all the ones who do, you see direct savings while giving them a direct financial benefit.
3. Implement policies for shared incentives
Visibility is only useful if it leads to better decisions. Once companies can see where savings come from, they can build travel policies that reward the behaviors behind them.
Most travel programs still rely on control. Budgets, approvals, and restrictions are designed to contain costs, but they rarely change habits. People comply because they have to, not because they care about the outcome.
A shared-incentive model changes that dynamic. When employees can see the value they create and share in the benefit, they start acting with the company’s goals in mind. That could take a few different forms:
- Direct rewards for employees who choose lower-cost options or book early.
- Recognition programs for teams that consistently stay under budget.
- Flexible travel budgets that let employees reinvest savings into trips that matter most.
Those ideas work because they’re built on visibility and trust, not enforcement. Once efficiency becomes something people participate in, not something imposed on them, discipline takes care of itself.
Redefining cost efficiency for the new era of corporate travel
For years, the travel industry has treated cost efficiency as a secondary concern. Platforms made it easy to spend and hard to understand, and most companies learned to live with that tradeoff.
Real progress starts when the economics change. When vendors earn from savings instead of spend, when margins are transparent, and when employees share in the benefit, efficiency stops being a management goal and becomes a shared habit.
We’re trying to shift away from systems that profit from volume and toward ones that reward alignment. Because when every part of the model works toward the same outcome, travel doesn’t just cost less. It works better.
Want to see what kind of savings you could get with Roamr? Reach out and we’ll show you.
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