If you're a travel manager at a large company, you probably don't need a GBTA study to tell you this — but they've confirmed it anyway: the job has gotten harder. Not easier. Harder. And that's worth talking about.

The reality

From working with travel managers at Fortune 500 companies, I see the same pattern. These are smart, capable, strategic people who know exactly what should be done in their programs. And there's so much of it they want to get to but just can't.

The past few years have been relentless. The pandemic and everything that came with it. Technology migrations that consumed months or years of focus. TMC transitions that nobody saw coming. Sustainability commitments that needed to be reflected in travel policy. None of these were optional — they were mandatory, and they had to take priority. Travel managers had no choice but to focus there. And beyond those non-negotiables, they've been able to take on a few of the projects they care about, but there's so much more sitting in the backlog. Important initiatives that they know would make a real difference for their programs, waiting for a window that never quite opens.

And when that window does appear, tackling a new initiative is hard. No one would debate that.

Recreating the wheel

This is a concept I keep coming back to. Travel managers are constantly recreating the wheel — at every organization, for every initiative — and the wheel is a lot more complex than people realize.

Take something like improving preferred hotel compliance. You need to figure out the right messaging approach. You need to write the copy. You need to design the communication. You need to determine who should receive what message, when, and how. You need to set up the delivery mechanism, maintain it, measure whether it's working, and keep iterating. That's copywriting, graphic design, behavioral psychology, data analysis, and campaign management — for one initiative. Now multiply that across every priority in the program: sustainability, duty of care, expense policy, new traveler onboarding, preferred suppliers across multiple categories.

Travel managers were hired to architect the program — to understand how all the different pieces relate to each other and to their organization, and to set up those pieces in a way that supports the overall goals of the business and its travelers. That's their superpower. They were not hired to be the copywriter, the graphic designer, the data analyst, or the campaign manager. But when there's no system handling the execution, the architect picks up a hammer and starts building walls. And once you're building walls, you're not designing buildings.

We see this across every program we work with. And here's the thing — many of these travel managers have probably built these exact same wheels at previous companies. They've done it before, and now they're doing it again somewhere else. It's just how it is today.

Automating the full cycle

When I talk about automation in corporate travel, I don't mean auto-approvals or the ability for a traveler to easily change their trip. In fact, we shouldn't be talking about those as advancements anymore.

What would really change the game is automating the full optimization cycle: understanding what could be better in your program, coming up with a plan to make it better, implementing that plan, measuring whether it worked, and adjusting based on the results. That's what so much of this is about, and there are dozens of things that go into each step. Today, travel managers handle that cycle manually — and they can realistically only run it for a small handful of initiatives at a time. Everything else sits in the backlog.

What if that full cycle ran automatically? What if the system could identify the opportunities, determine the right approach for each traveler, deliver the guidance, measure the results, and adapt — without requiring the travel manager to personally execute every step?

Amplifying the superpower

The travel manager's superpower is how they architect their program. They understand how policies, suppliers, priorities, and traveler needs all relate to each other and to their organization. They know how to set up those pieces to support the goals of the business and its travelers. That expertise is irreplaceable.

What Catalyst does is amplify that superpower across the entire organization. Instead of building every initiative from scratch, the travel manager sets the direction. Instead of choosing between priorities because they can only execute a few at a time, everything runs simultaneously. Instead of recreating the wheel, the behavioral frameworks and best practices are already embedded in the platform. The system executes on their vision — personalized to each traveler, adaptive based on behavior, across every touchpoint throughout the trip journey.

The travel manager focuses on strategy, governance, and program design. The platform handles the copywriting, the campaign management, the personalization logic, the measurement, and the adaptation. That's how it should work. With Catalyst, that's how it works now.

Travel managers deserve better

Travel managers are too good to be spending their time on things that a platform should handle. They're too valuable to be stuck recreating wheels they've already built — in some cases, at multiple companies before this one.

The bandwidth problem is real, and it's not going away on its own. Expectations from leadership and travelers are only going to increase. The solution isn't asking travel managers to do more. It's giving them a platform that handles the execution while they focus on what they were hired for — being the architect.

It's about time the technology caught up.