Looking at the list of Europe’s top TMCs ordered by gross sales increasingly feels like watching the Tour de France.
At the front, we see a lone rider who has accelerated away from the rest of the field who has gambled on giving it all to attempt to win the race.
Just behind the yellow jersey of Amex GBT we find a leading group of nine other riders, the travel management companies with sales in excess of €750 million who fancy their chances at winning the scale game. It is largely made up of truly multinational companies who operate at scale in a number of European countries – the likes of BCD Travel, FCM and Corporate Travel Management.
Behind these leaders we find the peloton of 20 or so TMCs whose volumes of business travel spend is somewhere north of €150 million. In this main pack, we find many large TMCs that are mainly focused on one country – Norway’s Berg Hansen, Italy’s Gattinoni Travel and Spain’s Nautalia Empresas, for example. Increasingly, companies in this group are trying to break away into the leading group, perhaps by buying a TMC in another country or swallowing up smaller competitors in their own, just as Gray Dawes Group is doing.
The others in the list may never have a chance of winning this race, but you never know. In 1956, Roger Walkowiak was a last-minute replacement for one of the teams in the Tour de France. Walkowiak never won a single stage but by being in the winning pack on the seventh stage from Lorient to Angers he gained an 18-minute advantage over many of his competitors. By remaining cool, he defended his lead until his eventual victory in Paris. But enough of the cycling analogies.
This list of Europe’s 30 largest TMCs represents some €42 billion of spend on business travel. It’s a lot but still a drop in the ocean compared to the size of the overall European business travel market, which is expected to amount to €386 billion by 2025, according to the Global Business Travel Association. This difference shows that many people still buy their business travel directly from airlines and hotels while many others user smaller TMCs that do not make this list.
The diversity in this list is plain to see – from a range of different countries, from family-owned specialists to multinational giants focused on vast volume – but inevitably, the list will undergo rapid change in the years to come.