DerbySoft’s White Paper Reveals Surprising Insights From Industry Leaders on the Future of Business Travel Distribution & Payments

DerbySoft’s compelling new white paper, Rethinking Business Travel Distribution & Payments, brings long-standing industry challenges into sharper focus and offers a practical framework for moving past them. Based on industry roundtables held in London and Denver, the paper reveals a travel landscape that is recovering in volume but struggling under the weight of fragmented systems, inconsistent processes, and outdated commercial structures.

While global business travel continues its steady growth, the systems behind it have not adapted at the same pace. The white paper makes it clear: distribution and payment processes have reached a level of complexity that affects profitability, traveler confidence, and day-to-day operations across the value chain.

What emerges is a picture of an industry operating in silos, each navigating its own version of fragmentation while trying to deliver consistency in an environment that has outgrown its infrastructure.

The Reality for Hotels, TMCs, and Payment Providers

Hotels are seeing growth in key segments, especially SMB and workforce travel. Yet rising costs and limited visibility into channel performance make it difficult for them to plan effectively. At the property level, teams face inconsistent booking and payment flows, creating uncertainty at check-in and adding hours of reconciliation work later.

TMCs face a different version of the same challenge. Corporate customers now expect flexibility across multiple channels, whether OTA, GDS, or direct, and each path brings its own set of operational steps. Payment reliability has become a deciding factor for travelers, and gaps in prepayment processes continue to send business to channels that can offer a smoother experience.

Payment providers see pressure mounting as card-not-present transactions increase. With compliance checks, fees, and fraud reviews layered in, understanding the true economics behind each transaction becomes more difficult.

Across the ecosystem, the symptoms are similar: too many systems that do not speak the same language, too many processes that rely on manual correction, and too little visibility into how money and data move from one end of the chain to the other.

The Pain Points Slowing the Industry Down

The white paper identifies three recurring barriers:

• Fragmented distribution that limits hotels’ visibility into real costs and forces TMCs into workarounds.

• Inconsistent payment and reconciliation processes that place unnecessary stress on travelers and operational teams.

• Opaque economics that obscure account value and distort decision-making.

These issues are not new—but the discussions show they have reached a point where traditional, incremental fixes no longer produce meaningful improvement.

Signs That a Shift Is Already Underway

Despite these challenges, the paper highlights encouraging progress. Direct partnerships between hotels and TMCs are reducing cost and improving collaboration. Payment solutions integrated with ERP and expense systems are shortening the reconciliation cycle. Efforts to standardize data, including unified hotel identifiers, are helping close long-standing attribution gaps. And AI-supported tools are improving procurement decisions and increasing attachment rates by surfacing relevant inventory at the right moment.

These pockets of innovation show that the industry is not short on ideas—it simply needs the infrastructure to support them at scale.

DerbySoft’s Role in Enabling a More Connected Model

The white paper positions DerbySoft as a partner focused on addressing the structural issues that sit at the root of today’s friction.

• Connectivity and content normalization ensure that TMCs receive complete, clean, and consistent data, reducing leakage for hotels and improving the traveler experience.

• Payment and reconciliation support standardizes VCC acceptance and reduces errors at the property level, simplifying settlement for all parties.

• Transparency and innovation tools help stakeholders understand true costs, map bookings accurately, experiment with new sourcing strategies, and automate manual workflows.

Instead of offering isolated solutions, DerbySoft is working to align the pieces including content, payments, and transparency so that each part of the ecosystem operates with clarity and consistency.

A Way Forward That Requires Collaboration

The message is clear: corporate travel cannot continue relying on infrastructure built for a different era. Progress requires shared standards, clean data, transparent economics, and technology that reduces manual work rather than shifting it from one party to another.

The organizations that invest in these capabilities now will be better positioned to meet rising expectations for accuracy, speed, and reliability, and to compete in a marketplace that increasingly rewards operational excellence.

Download the Full White Paper

DerbySoft’s white paper offers a grounded, practical look at how the travel ecosystem can work together to remove friction and build a model that is more efficient for hotels, TMCs, payment providers, and travelers.

To explore the insights, frameworks, and recommendations in more detail, download the free whitepaper: Rethinking Business Travel Distribution & Payments.

About DerbySoft

DerbySoft is the Travel Commerce Accelerator with a mission to converge the diverse elements of travel, creating a unified and efficient ecosystem of connectivity services, high-performing AI-driven marketing services, and an end-to-end content platform. Our world-class services are designed to deliver seamless, frictionless commerce, accelerating the pace at which travel businesses can connect, grow, and optimize profit.

DerbySoft consistently pushes the boundaries of innovation to unlock new opportunities and accelerate travel commerce.

Our team of Hospitality and Flight industry experts is passionate about uniting people and technology and committed to enhancing every aspect of travel, making it more accessible, efficient, and enjoyable for all. Including the acquisition of PKFARE in 2024, our approach is centered on making travel better – not just for today, but for years to come, for both the Hospitality and Flight industries.

Headquartered in Dallas, Texas, USA, DerbySoft’s cutting-edge technology is trusted by the world’s leading online travel distribution, hotel, and flight companies in 197 countries. To learn more, visit DerbySoft.com.