What’s your new year’s resolution for 2025? Mine is old school: I want to get fitter. There’s a lot to be said for home working but all too often, before I know it, it’s 6pm and I’ve only got up for the occasional loo break or to grab a ham and pickle sandwich.

So this year I’m going to take proper time out which means – gasp – going outside in the fresh air. You may think that’s not the natural habitat of a CTO and you’d be right but believe it or not I have been quite a keen cyclist in the past. I particularly love my mountain bike, which comes in very useful for traversing the snow-capped peaks of my native Suffolk.

“So this year I’m going to take proper time out which means – gasp – going outside in the fresh air”

But what could we see more of from a business travel perspective in 2025? Well, here’s a controversial thought. One trend I reckon we might see more of is corporates taking some booking functions in-house that are handled today by travel management companies.

When I started in business travel, quite a few large companies had their own in-house agencies, partly because they collected a tasty 9% airline commission on all the bookings. That idea largely died out when commissions disappeared in the late 1990s, but it has lived on the US in what are known as corporate travel departments (the CTD model). Outside America, I see in-house booking more for specialised needs like marine travel.

But what goes around comes around, and maybe having someone in-house with a global distribution system terminal will begin to make sense again. Advances in technology mean an in-house travel person or team can easily access agency-level systems.

And remember you no longer need the specialised knowledge of airport and airline codes and the rest of it to book via a traditional GDS “green screen”. Today’s GDS front ends are more intuitively point-and-click, and companies like TripStax can add layers on top of those front ends to make them even more user-friendly and efficient.

“Advances in technology mean an in-house travel person or team can easily access agency-level systems”

In any case, not everything need be, or even can be, booked via a GDS anymore. It’s really worth checking out just how much you can book instead via portals using more modern principles like New Distribution Capability. You might even score a better deal with your preferred airlines if you agree to use booking channels that reduce their distribution costs. You could also gain more direct control of your data, something I know many travel managers are crying out for.

Just to be clear, I’m not advocating cutting TMCs adrift. They provide services where they add significant value – some of which provide larger margins, so focusing more on those areas could be a win-win.

Maximising time and effort versus reward is certainly something I’ll be doing more of. Wish me luck as I venture back out into the wilderness, SWILLed-up and ready to go.

Scott Wylie is Chief Technology Officer for TripStax.