Tech Hotlist 2026
In no particular order, here's our pick of the tech innovators and innovations shaking up the world of business travel this year
Complete, by Concur and Amex GBT
Big promises were made when SAP Concur and American Express GBT formed a strategic alliance last October and announced the collaborative development of Complete, an AI-driven travel, expense and servicing platform.
With 80% of their joint clients now using it, and upgrades coming thick and fast, it’s secured a spot in our hotlist. Notable recent innovations include comprehensive leakage reporting to give travel managers total visibility of all T&E spend, plus personalised loyalty perks and special offers displayed at the point of booking to maximise programme ROI.
Complete customers can also now benefit from centralised disruption management with real-time alerts and the ability to make self-service trip adjustments directly in the app. We look forward to seeing what’s coming next.
concur.co.uk/solutions/complete
Vibe Systems MCP servers
MCP, the Model Context Protocol, is an open standard connecting AI assistants like ChatGPT and Claude to business systems and everyone in the industry seems to be talking about it right now. Vibe, which builds platform tech behind TMCs, claims it was the first in managed travel to put a live MCP server into production in July this year.
The inaugural client was ITG Business Travel and its MD, Mat Cook, sings its praises: “It puts us in the AI conversation without the build cost, and our clients are using it today.”
Crucially, bookings land in the same back office as any other, so duty of care and reporting are unaffected.
GEMMA by Take2Eton
The meetings and events sector has long faced a tech divide: powerful event management platforms often come with enterprise-level price tags, putting them beyond the reach of many organisations.
GEMMA, Take2Eton Group’s proprietary event and group travel platform, is changing that, delivering sophisticated functionality but with a flexible, scalable pricing model. What’s more, through live dashboards, clients can monitor event budgets in real time, see costs per traveller and monitor room allocations, giving complete financial transparency.
Atriis Global Shared Services
High-performing regional TMCs no longer need to imitate the ‘megas’ or build expensive international networks. Through Atriis Global Shared Services they can collaborate, extend their reach and jointly serve multinational accounts without sacrificing what makes them locally exceptional. One platform unifies policy, profiles, content, reporting, duty of care and servicing, giving corporates global control without surrendering their local market expertise, content, fares, language or knowledge to a single operating model.
“This is not another AI wrapper, it is infrastructure for a more open, competitive and resilient corporate travel,” says the Atriis pitch. “Atriis does not replace the local heroes, it connects them and gives them global reach.”
Arbitrip
Arbitrip is changing the way travel brands sell hotels by replacing generic, price-led booking with intelligent personalisation. So, rather than simply displaying the lowest-priced options, the platform understands traveller context. It will recognise, for example, that a business-class traveller with a higher travel spend is unlikely to be seeking the cheapest hotel and prioritises recommendations that better match their profile and journey.
It gives airlines, TMCs and travel brands access to sophisticated AI through fully white-labelled technology and beyond the tech, Arbitrip also manages hotel fulfilment and provides dedicated customer support.
TripStax & ALTOUR
We’re all about togetherness at The Business Travel Magazine, so this tech collaboration was a no-brainer for this year’s hotlist.
For decades, global agency networks have shared branding and commercial agreements, but agencies have continued to operate independently, using different systems, workflows and data. TripStax has changed that with a new solution for ALTOUR’s independent agencies.
Through its sophisticated logic and workflow platform, TripStax QC, it has created a single technology platform for quality control, traveller profiles, booking data, documentation and workflow, enabling agencies serving 90+ markets to operate as one organisation while retaining local expertise.
Acai Travel
Corporate travel automated the ‘front’ of the trip years ago and mid-office robotics have monitored GDS queues for schedule changes for two decades. But what didn’t get automated is the work that follows: the traveller emailing at 11pm to move tomorrow’s flight, the exchange that means reading fare rules, PNR history, checking policy, quoting the difference and reissuing the ticket. That work still lands on an agent, which is why TMC economics never changed.
Then along came Acai, which automates the complex servicing – or the ‘dirty work’ as its founder and CEO Riccardo Vittoria describes it. Acai’s AI agents work inside a TMC’s existing environment, across GDS and NDC, and inside CX platforms such like Zendesk, Front, Salesforce and Ringcentral.
They analyse each incoming conversation, retrieve booking, apply rules and policy, and execute the resolution end-to-end, with a full audit trail on every action. At one leading European TMC, 65% of 7,200 daily service emails now route with zero manual review. Impressive!
Clarity
We’re taking a punt on this one because Beta testing doesn’t start until later this year, but based on previous form we’re confident Clarity’s latest tech innovation will hit the mark. It’s bringing together its travel management platform, ClarityGo, and its meetings tech, MeetingsPro, to transform how organisations plan, book and manage travel and meetings.
The highlight is ClarityInsights, which can see total costs in real-time and consolidates reporting to support better budgeting, programme control and sustainability considerations, while ClarityTrack can locate and contact travellers worldwide. The tech team has thought of everything.
Serko.ai
With Serko.ai, instead of a search box, travellers simply describe what they need, for example “same-day flight to close a deal in Boston” and Serko.ai’s agents take over, booking and managing the trip end-to-end, personalised to purpose, preference and loyalty status – and all within company policy.
But the bigger shift happens after booking because Serko.ai keeps re-shopping for better fares on the same booking and watches for disruption from 24 hours out. If a flight is delayed or cancelled, it’s already rebooking before the traveller even knows there’s a problem. Better still, full refunds come up to three hours before departure, meaning plans change without penalty.
For travel managers, this intelligence becomes governance: dynamic guardrails that flex with trip purpose, automatic escalation only when it matters, and clean, audit-ready data instead of month-old reports. Initial pilots are going well.
DGI ETHOS
Unlike traditional out-the-box travel management solutions, DGI’s Enterprise Travel Hub, known as ETHOS, is built and adapted around the needs of each client, combining powerful functionality with an intuitive user experience.
Through seven fully-integrated modules, it supports every stage of the travel journey – from accessing exclusive global content through ethosSelect and simplifying bookings with ethosBook, to enabling seamless system integration with ethosSync, enhancing traveller safety through ethosProtect, delivering actionable insights via ethosInsight, managing travel on the move with ethosGo, and driving compliance through ethosControl.
Like all good tech solutions, it was developed in response to customer feedback, and also integrates seamlessly with clients’ existing systems.
Sophie, by Grapevine and Jyrney
Managing taxis, ride-hails and chauffeur drives just got easier thanks to a partnership between Grapevine and Jyrney. Meet Sophie, their new AI travel assistant, who can book managed ground transport through Jyrney by text or voice message and pairs natural AI conversation with deterministic booking flows.
Crucially, the developers have recognised the transport booking process contains many variables – clarifications on pick-up and drop-off locations, quotes, bookings, amendments, cancellations – so they’ve focused heavily on building an agentic solution that blends probabilistic conversation with deterministic booking flows. After all, a booking that is “probably right” is not good enough when a traveller is arriving late at the airport after a long flight.
FCG AgreeEase
Hands up who enjoys hotel sourcing. Yes, we thought so! The hotel RFP process can involve thousands of emails and months of follow-up, collecting proposals, comparing inconsistent offers, managing negotiations and coordinating rate implementation. What’s more, with spreadsheets and inboxes, actions can be missed.
Step forward AgreeEase, which turns that workflow into a managed, data-informed decision process. Historical booking data and heatmaps show where employees actually travel, clients then define what matters – such as price, location or cancellation terms – and AgreeEase applies those priorities consistently across proposals.
Weighted analysis and AI-supported recommendations explain whether a hotel should be accepted, rejected or renegotiated, identify potential risks and suggest negotiation targets and alternative terms. So much simpler.
Entry Ready, by Perk
One of the biggest sources of hidden work in managed travel is navigating changing visa rules and digital travel authorisations. Travellers research requirements, examine government websites, pay out of pocket, and submit expense claims, while travel and finance teams have limited visibility.
That’s why Perk developed Entry Ready, a travel and spend platform that integrates visa and Electronic Travel Authorisation (ETA) requirements, applications, and payments directly into the booking experience. Using a traveller’s stored passport profile, and available through a partnership with Sherpa, Entry Ready proactively identifies entry requirements before booking and enables eligible eVisa and ETA applications and payment without leaving Perk.
Entry Ready has already analysed more than 500,000 trips and processes applications 20% faster than government portals. Travellers have confidence they hold the right documentation, travel managers gain greater compliance, and finance teams receive a single, consolidated travel cost. Everyone’s happy!
Oversee Hotel Reshop
Oversee’s AI-powered hotel price assurance platform continuously monitors rates after booking, up to the time of check-in, and automatically rebooks the same property and room category the moment a lower rate appears. Not only does the tech solution deliver up to 4% savings on hotel spend, more than 40% of rebookings end up landing the traveller in a better room.
One TMC deployed Oversee’s Hotel Reshop across $30m in contracted hotel volume and saw $1m savings for its customers on their hotel spend. The figures speak for themselves.
Nowadays
Venue sourcing is still largely run over email and spreadsheets. A single RFP means calling or emailing dozens of hotels across time zones, then waiting days for proposals that arrive as 50-plus-page PDFs – each formatted differently, in different currencies, with rates, concessions, F&B minimums and attrition buried in dense prose. Comparing five properties can take a planner a full day of manual work.
But Nowadays automates this workflow. A planner describes their event in plain language and Nowadays’ AI structures it into a proper RFP, searches a database of 400,000+ venues, and reaches out over email and phone in 22+ languages to secure availability. As proposals arrive, Nowadays parses them instantly into a clean breakdown – rates, concessions, F&B, attrition – automatically converted into the planner’s currency, regardless of what currency the hotel quoted in. Not only does it significanly speed up the whole process, it’s also helping enterprises negotiate up to 30% lower hotel rates.
SureSIM
Traveller adoption remains an unsolved problem in travel risk management. Programmes are built around GPS-enabled safety apps, but only around 10% of travellers ever switch tracking on.
SureSIM’s Location Awareness closes the duty-of-care gap by removing adoption from the equation. Its backup data SIM, already deployed for business continuity connectivity, doubles as a passive location signal. The moment a traveller lands and connects to a new network abroad, SureSIM identifies the cell tower and pushes city or town-level location data straight into travel risk platforms. It’s live globally and costs a few dollars per user per month.
