TRAVEL AGAIN PODCAST — Season 4, Episode 4
Guest: Stephan Baars, CEO, BCD Travel
Hosts: Mike McCormick & Ed Silver
Transcript, separated by speaker

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INTRO

ANNOUNCER: Welcome to the Travel Again podcast, where we look inside the
business of travel, one conversation at a time. We explore the strategies,
shifts, and stories driving transformation in travel. Please welcome our
hosts, Mike McCormick and Ed Silver.

ED: Hello, Mike. How you doing?

MIKE: Good. How are you?

ED: Doing good. I’m excited to do another edition here. Oh, let me stop the
music. There you go. All set. Well, exciting times and certainly interesting
guests today. I’m excited for this one.

MIKE: The CEO of a brand that is the fourth-largest agency in the world, with
over twenty-five billion in annual sales — privately owned, with a reputation
for excellent service and long-standing client relationships.

ED: Whoa, this one’s going to be good, Mike.

MIKE: Yeah. And as we’ve been writing about, talking about — and certainly
right in the middle of — there’s this massive foundational change in the
industry. What’s happened with AI, obviously. But I think on a broader scale,
not just that. That’s been part of the ingredients, maybe the gasoline that
lit the fire in a sense. But there’s just change coming that’s been coming.
And as the big brands are certainly repositioning themselves for success, you
see this kind of foundational change throughout the industry — not just in the
front end where the customer is concerned, but really the whole plumbing for
the industry, right? And that’s what’s exciting. These times — this is such a
great inflection point. One that we were part of, back with the going-online
phase, and there are parallels. But not everything is exactly the same either,
right? You learn from history, but it’s not an exact duplication. There are
new variables. Very interesting times, right?

ED: It is indeed. What do you say we bust right into it and get into the news,
Mike?

MIKE: Sure. Let’s do it.

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NEWS

ED: All right. We’ve got three excellent articles covering the spectrum of
travel today. The first is an article from our friends at Business Travel
News. Mike, the latest industry data suggests business travel demand continues
to strengthen, but the recovery remains uneven. International travel, certain
sectors, and premium are all doing well, while other areas remain more
cautious. Rather than asking whether business travel has recovered, companies
are now asking what the “new normal” looks like. I’ll pull up the article from
BTN, but why don’t you give us some context here, Mike?

MIKE: Well, like we’ve said — and said in our past roles in the association
world and throughout our time in the industry — business travel drives
business growth, right? So companies still realize that even in this highly
virtual age there’s still tremendous value in travel, in face-to-face, and
what it means. Companies are still going strong doing so. Plus, every company
is part of a global economy — that means travel to places that aren’t all in
your backyard, or in your home country. So growth has been good and solid and
steady. It’s somewhat predictable. We kind of saw this coming. It was a much
slower recovery than leisure travel as it all came back, but we’re kind of
where we thought we’d be. The only interesting thing is that it’s really
dependent — and certainly the world’s providers, airlines, hotels, et cetera,
are really reliant on premium travel. If that starts to soften, it will change
the industry yet again. But right now, business travel is in a good place.

ED: That’s great. I agree with all that. Down here we track RevPAR and ADR
across the county, and this summer’s picking up nicely, and our forecast is it
will continue. So I hope that remains nationwide and the external factors
don’t drag us down any further.

MIKE: You got it.

ED: Speaking of premium seats, Mike, the next article is from our friends at
Skift. Delta is introducing a lower-priced basic business fare for Delta One
and other premium cabins. Travelers still receive the premium seat and onboard
experience, but give up benefits such as lounge access, flexible changes,
higher mileage accrual, and dedicated premium check-in. The move extends the
unbundling strategy that transformed economy cabins into premium segments,
giving travelers more price points while allowing Delta to maximize premium
revenue. The bundling and unbundling of products has been going on for years —
the cycle continues. Just try to break this one down, Mike. What is Delta
doing, and why?

MIKE: We know why they’re doing it, right? It’s all about the money. How can
we get a little more margin, a little more anything, from the demand? I looked
at it more practically. Delta, United, others — back to that point about being
dependent on the premium cabin — they’re riding that wave to the extreme,
right? International premium has been a huge factor in their current success.
So if they can squeeze a little more mileage out of it, great. But practically,
from a customer perspective — no seat assignment with a business-class seat? If
I’m traveling internationally, I could be traveling with someone. I’m not going
anywhere near the airport without a seat assignment. The uncertainty of where
I’m going to be seated… I don’t think it’s practical. And to save what — a few
hundred dollars on a five-thousand-dollar ticket? You’d have to be saving a lot
of money. Not for business travelers. This seems kind of off.

ED: I think I agree with you.

MIKE: I mean, look, personally — the lounge access, okay, I’m not… the extra
mileage, for your mileage junkies, sure, that’s a real issue. It just becomes a
matter of degrees. If you’re talking, am I giving up a little bit of mileage,
maybe I can justify it. But the example they were giving — saving two hundred
dollars — that’s not going to be a motivator to go to some basic business
product. But we’ll see. Again, I’m overlaying personal views on a marketplace,
so it may or may not be valid. It is interesting nonetheless.

ED: I do think it’s funny — I’ve heard so many economists talk about how there
are two economic business models: there’s bundling and there’s unbundling. And
you just go through these cycles, and you wonder what the airlines are going to
do next. So anyway, very, very interesting. I’ve got one more story for you,
Mike. You ready for it?

MIKE: Yep, let’s go.

ED: Hilton and Navan announced a direct API integration that makes Navan the
first travel management company to connect directly to Hilton’s CRS — their
central reservation system — and their content services. The integration
provides real-time rates and availability, richer hotel content, and more
seamless booking, while reducing reliance on traditional intermediaries. It
represents a significant evolution in hotel distribution, similar to how
airline NDC created direct connects between airlines and travel sellers. So
tell us about this one. This one’s a little more technical, and I don’t know if
comparing it to NDC is such a good idea — but break it down for us.

MIKE: Yeah, so, I think it’s an interesting announcement, right? Because if
you’re talking about Navan getting really enhanced access to content that they
normally wouldn’t have, and that Hilton wouldn’t normally distribute other than
through their direct offering — okay, that could be interesting. But the devil’s
in the details. There’s a general comparison to NDC in terms of, hey, now
there’s direct access. And look, this is going direct in a sense — having direct
connections, airline, hotel, car, et cetera, has always been kind of the dream,
right? Somehow you get some additional benefit, it gives your customer increased
value, you take out an intermediary, there’s money in there to be shared among
the parties because you’re not paying an intermediary for that connection. In
theory, great. In practice, what gets hard is you’ve got a cost of creating and
maintaining that connection that you have to factor in. Direct isn’t always
better. It comes down to who’s going to get the real benefit here. And you have
to have scale — that’s the other thing. This gets harder for it to economically
make sense; you have to have a lot of scale for it to pay off, because you’re
usually dealing in pennies, not dollars, in terms of benefits. So, long story
short, I think it’s interesting, and it certainly points to the direction that
the major brands are always looking for — those opportunities — and certainly
major distributors are as well.

ED: Yeah. My only comment on this — maybe it’s tangential — but this is
obviously B2B, where APIs really come into play. But I actually think what’s
coming at us as a tsunami is the work between API and MCP — model context
protocol — where users and even businesses can connect to giants like Amadeus,
like other GDSs, like Navan, who announced an MCP. These are all coming for
every business. And they’re an easier way to connect. APIs are a little more
complicated; MCPs are just tied to the MCP. Tell your AI agent, “I want to
connect to this MCP,” and all of a sudden you’ve got as much power as an API
does. So very interesting to keep an eye on both what Navan has done here, but
also where MCPs are headed in the future.

MIKE: Yeah. And I don’t think there’s any doubt that that’s going to be the new
way — that it’s going to take over. And to your point, APIs are going to become
an old-school way to connect. But we’ll see. Again, interesting insight on the
tech side too, right? Because of what this means in terms of the agentic world
war — everything’s moving toward that, or at least seems to be.

ED: Yes. All right, Mike, that is the news. We’ll be right back with our guest.

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SPONSOR — TravelRx

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MIKE: Yeah. And so they launched a jump-the-line service. Now, this is a product
not necessarily for the customers and travelers of our guest today, but for
people — small businesses, individual travelers — that don’t have those same
benefits and don’t have a twenty-four/seven line they can call that’s there to
help them. So basically it’s for travelers that get caught in disruption when
they’re on the road. In addition to all the duty-of-care health benefits they
offer, they have this jump-the-line service where all you do is, on their app,
you hit a button saying “I need help,” and you get a call back from an agent
within like two minutes. And then they take you through helping you create new
reservations, changes, whatever you have to do. And as we know — this is, in the
old… oh, I’m showing my age here. There used to be a time when, let’s say,
your flight on United got canceled and they weren’t flying, they would walk you
over to a competing airline that had a flight, right? I know that seems like
many, many years ago. I feel very old when I say that. But the reality is, in
today’s age, you don’t have that option. You’re not going to walk to another
flight or make a change like that unless you know for sure that you can get on
the other flight. So anyway, those are things they can help you with. It’s a
cool service, and it’s one that helps plug the gap for individual travelers and
small businesses that don’t have the benefit and support of our guest today.

ED: All right. Thanks, Mike. Download it today to discover the power of Safe
Travel Rx. Safe Travel Rx, your prescription for better travel.

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GUEST INTERVIEW — Stephan Baars, CEO, BCD Travel

ED: Mike, now on to our guest.

MIKE: Yes.

ED: Few executives have a better view of where business travel is headed than
our guest today. Stephan Baars is the CEO of BCD Travel, one of the world’s
largest privately held travel management companies, serving clients in more
than one hundred and seventy countries with over twenty-five billion in annual
sales. After many years in senior leadership, including serving as the global
CFO, Stephan became CEO in twenty twenty-three and is leading BCD through one of
the most transformative periods our industry has ever experienced. Stephan, it
will be great to see you. Please welcome to the stage, Stephan Baars.

MIKE: Stephan, welcome. Hey, good to have you here today.

STEPHAN: Yes, thank you for inviting me. I have to say, we have a little
technical problem — sorry to start with that. I can only hear Mike. I can’t hear
Ed. So Mike, you have to give me all the questions now.

MIKE: That’s okay. If Ed chimes in, I can certainly relay the question.

STEPHAN: I tried to read his lips, but I’m not good at that.

MIKE: No problem, Stephan. Sorry about that, but I hear you loud and clear.

STEPHAN: Great to be here.

MIKE: Sometimes it makes me laugh — in this great age of all our technical
advancement, right? Sometimes it’s the simple things that still fail us. Well,
welcome. It’s great to have you. I’ll start off — Ed mentioned the transition
from global CFO. And I know you went back and worked in the family office, and
you’ve been in and around the business for many, many years. But taking the CEO
chair, it’s a different role. When you took that over — and when you look at your
position today — how do you define success? And are the things you look at
different now that you’ve been in the role for a good three years-plus, than
they were before?

STEPHAN: Yeah, it’s a valid question, because I was asked, when turning from a
CFO into a CEO role, if that is the right move. But I believe the CFO time at
BCD Travel helped me a lot to understand the economics of the industry, the
economics of a company. The issue is, as a CFO you’ll very often be seen as a
gatekeeper — keeping control, being the one who needs to be tough on the cost
side. As a CEO, you have to change your view. That was, for me, a change in
perspective. You have to give your leadership team, the company, your teams a
vision. You have to analyze what’s going on in the industry so you set the right
strategy — not for the next year, but for the next years to come. And you both
talked about the technology changes in our industry — I have the feeling there
are more and more coming. As the CEO, you really have to focus on those more
than in my CFO role. Over the last three years, we’ve done that with our
leadership team — given ourselves a vision of where we want to take BCD in the
years to come. But one thing has not changed, and that is the value of what you
want to create: taking care of your teams, having engaged employees. That, for
me, is a definition of success — customer excellence in the middle of everything
we’re doing. We’re in the service industry, in combination with great
technology. So that’s where I, as a CEO, focus. But success is defined by having
a team that at the end of the day can deliver together, in a company our size,
on a global level. That was the same when I was the CFO, and it’s the same being
the CEO now at BCD Travel.

MIKE: Well, you mentioned strategically making the investments and placing those
bets. Right now, with AI, big bets are being placed — a big capital budget is
being spent. How much of the traditional travel model can be automated? What
does this mean for what you need in terms of headcount? How do you look at the
model going forward? Because BCD has always been known for its service and
support for its customers. What’s your vision for that?

STEPHAN: Yeah, everyone in the industry is now defining for themselves what AI
will bring. What we see is that artificial intelligence can enhance the way we
do service. It can take away manual processes — not only in our industry, but in
many others. Our travel industry has many manual processes still existing. So
that was, and will be, for every TMC, the first area to look at. That’s where we
free up capacity, where we can focus our travel agents — who we still believe we
need, despite all the technology coming — to service customers in a way that is
very special, that is requested and asked for, especially in times when the
industry is disrupted. So AI will enable us to give better time, higher-quality
services to our customers by taking away manual processes. Look at email
automation, where everybody is already experimenting. We have the first
successes in automatically reading emails to understand the need of the customer
and make it easier for our travel agents. In times when the business is
disrupted, we help them react faster on the customer side — to know where the
customers, the employees, the travelers are — to give them solutions. AI can
give us many more data points and analyze that much faster than a human being.
But there will be decision points where we firmly believe you still need the
human interaction, where you still need the human brain together with the
artificial-intelligence brain. There is no doubt there are many areas in travel
where AI will change how we work and reduce the manual intervention. But there
is enough where service quality still plays a role. That combination — new
artificial-intelligence technology combined with what we have as a travel agency
already: outstanding service, outstanding agents with long expertise — that’s a
fantastic combination.

MIKE: Given your background as a CFO, I think you appreciate — I’m very wary of
anything that touches the actual expense-approval process. Anywhere there’s a
money decision being made, you don’t want to not have a human-like interface
there to look at the decision. It’s not all about automating in those cases —
you have to be really careful about controls in the right places too, I’d
assume.

STEPHAN: Yeah, that’s true, Mike. And that’s what we see in discussions with our
customers very often. Everybody’s asking, where’s the industry going, Stephan?
Where are you taking BCD when it comes to artificial intelligence with your
teams? And once we have solutions ready, some will be fast-adopted, but several
others take a while, because customers are not sure — A, is that the way we want
to get service, and B, security is another one. Everybody takes those AI
solutions through their very rigid process. Where’s the data hosted, where will
the data go, which data points are touched? It is something that will change the
world, and we are definitely investing a lot in this segment — but we should
never ignore the human intervention. That’s so important, and we just learned it
over the last, I would say, four months, where this industry has been in
constant disruption through the Middle East situation and many others — weather
and whatever. We learned that customers, at that moment, don’t want a machine
talking to you, but a human being who says, “I have your back. I find your
solution.”

MIKE: So stepping back from all this — we’re in an agentic world. Companies, and
certainly investment, are going heavily into effectively the pipes that control
the transaction. Historically TMCs have been vertically integrated. Everybody’s
moving toward platforms, ecosystems. Where do you see BCD going in terms of
investing in — and being considered — a platform company, as opposed to more of
a TMC? Where do you see the longer-term strategy fitting?

STEPHAN: Yeah. We at BCD, we wish to be an enabler for the platform, and not
only be seen as a platform provider. And I know that might differentiate us from
others in the industry that clearly give themselves the tech name out there —
“we are not a TMC anymore, we are a tech company.” That’s all great, and that’s
their decision. We believe you have to be open with the solutions you offer. So
we’ve clearly said we need a platform that enables many other solutions, added
to what a customer wants, to enhance the service — to take technology they
already use today and embed it in their travel program. An open platform,
combined with our travel expertise. And that is a growing demand in the
industry. To box a customer in has never been a good solution. There might be
segments in the market that appreciate that, but the customers we’re servicing
today want the freedom to decide where they’re going, which technology they’re
using. So I see the TMC world definitely moving more to technology. As you said,
AI will play an important role. But presenting ourselves as a tech company — I
think that would be wrong, because we’re in the service industry, driven by
great service, enabled by outstanding technology. I think that is the future.
And if we get that right on a global scale — not only in a country or a region —
then I think you’re best positioned to be as successful as we are at BCD.

MIKE: Okay. So I’m going to go to another part of the industry. We couldn’t
probably have this interview without talking about NDC at some point — another
area where a lot of investment, a lot of promise, and maybe, depending on who it
is, some benefit. But you reported that sixty-five percent of the itineraries
you have are enabled somehow with NDC. Have you crossed a tipping point in terms
of adoption? What’s been driving that success with you? Because I don’t think
others have seen that same level of success when it comes to NDC.

STEPHAN: Yeah, thanks, Mike, for pointing that out. Because if you go back one
and a half years, companies like BCD were criticized that we’re not open for NDC
solutions. But it was not that we were against NDC. We were against NDC
solutions that are not ready for our customers. So once the industry players
found ways to really enable NDC in the definition of giving the customer better
choices — that was the idea behind NDC, give more flexibility, let the customer
decide what they wanted — once we saw the first players were ready, we
immediately put the solutions in place. But we do it with a view that we have to
service customers, and they don’t want to hear from us, “Oh, sorry, NDC, the
servicing is not available — call the airline.” As you said earlier, calling the
airlines is sometimes painful, because they’re not prepared for that, even if
they state so. We needed to be ready, the industry needed to be ready, and now
we’re moving fast. But let’s be real: NDC still has some challenges. If the
industry is not willing to tackle these issues together — go through a defined
process, the same standards — for example, if every airline provider comes with
a different standard for NDC, they make life for travelers miserable, and for us
to do the servicing. Every solution today on NDC is a special-design solution.
That cannot be the future. Hence, if we want to drive faster as an industry —
the change to NDC, and say goodbye to EDIFACT one day — then we as an industry
have to sit together and say, okay, let’s define the standards. It’s in the
benefit of the customer. And if airlines believe that’s the better way to
distribute, then that’s fine — let’s move together to the standard. Servicing is
for us today the biggest issue on NDC. We see that with the existing airlines
where we have it already, and that is still painful for customers. They don’t
believe us that we can’t find a solution. But if the industry players don’t play
together, then you will never get there.

MIKE: Exactly. Yeah, I always thought that — not the standard in and of itself,
but what it can enable in terms of dynamic pricing and creating a much different
customer relationship, not just for the airline’s own benefit but to allow you,
as part of that, to create really unique outcomes. I found the potential
exciting. But to your point, there were a lot of — not missteps, but I think a
lot of misconceptions, maybe a better word — about what was really going to be
involved to truly service the customer. And it ended up creating a lot of
customer distrust, because it wasn’t about BCD, it wasn’t about what you wanted
to accomplish with them — it was just that, again, within the airline, a lot of
times the training wasn’t there, the support wasn’t there, there wasn’t even a
fully baked understanding through the entire process. So, to your credit,
sixty-five percent is a big number. And given the size and scale and global
scope of your business, that’s no small undertaking. But to your point of how
the industry has to work together to make these things happen — this can’t be
done in a vacuum, for sure.

STEPHAN: No. Absolutely, Mike. And yes, NDC is holding a lot of potential. If
you go back to the original idea, what NDC was designed for and why the industry
chose it, then I think we’ve made the step in the right direction. BCD is a
front-runner for several of these. But again, we need the industry — really the
will of the industry — to make the change together. Then I’m sure we can get
there.

MIKE: Well, we’ll see. It’s certainly an inflection point now in terms of how
much commitment there’s going to be to forge ahead. So we’ll see. Shifting gears
again — risk management. Our world has always been a risky place in a sense. But
one of our board members, Bruce McIndoe, who’s a risk expert, has said to us
numerous times that the world today, in terms of risk, is at a level he’s never
seen in his career. What kind of role does BCD play now, and where do you see
that going in terms of your role in being part of that risk-management offering
and solution?

STEPHAN: Yeah, I one-hundred-percent agree with your board member that there are
more risk situations now than we’ve ever seen before. And after COVID, this
industry hoped that would not continue — but it seems it’s becoming a common
trend that we have to deal with. Hence, we’ve put teams in place that really
support the customer. And that’s where, in the long run, solutions driven by
artificial intelligence can help us be faster in monitoring, in giving more
accurate information — where travelers are, how we can reach them. There’s a lot
of manual work still in the game today, where we use solutions like companies
such as Riskline that search so many data sources a human being can’t, which
enables us to give better solutions. We have to live with these risk situations,
and in those situations — as I said before — great technology with human
intervention plays such an important role. Customers come to us and say, “Okay,
you’ve proven in the last four months outstanding service, because you helped us
take the right decisions with the technology you gave, you had the right people,
you put more people on the line to help us and manage through those situations.”
That is where I define the role of a TMC as well. Combine good technology and
help customers in need to find the right ways and make easy decisions for their
companies, for the safety of the travelers. So this is a growing area. We manage
it with our team, twenty-four/seven. We use all data sources available and help
customers with those data points, for travelers in need, to come to the right
solution. Again, an area where AI will help us, does help us — but the human
interaction is what I always come back to. You want to talk to the human when
you are in trouble. You don’t want to talk to a machine. You don’t want to
answer the same question three times. You want someone who says, “I have your
back. I find you a solution.” Because they understand, in a needy situation, how
much service counts at that time.

MIKE: Yep. Great. All right, a couple of big-picture questions for you. One is,
when you look forward in terms of the whole value chain and distribution when it
comes to business travel — what areas do you think, in the coming years, are
most vulnerable for disruption? Where do you think the change will come?

STEPHAN: Yeah, I think most vulnerable are those where you have a lot of manual
intervention — those that are not automated yet. So our target needs to be to
get them automated, through whatever solution — AI, automatic robots, whatsoever
— to get them into the ecosystem. Not having those sitting outside the
ecosystem, and to focus, together with the industry, on those areas. I think
there are still many, and we’re closing the gap step by step. But again, it’s
nothing that will be a revolution. It’s something that will go along the line,
and the new technology developments will definitely help us there.

MIKE: Right. And then, stepping back — more of a BCD-specific question. When you
look back, knowing everything you know about the industry today, is there
anything you would have done differently when it comes to the building of BCD?

STEPHAN: That’s a good question. So that refers back to the one who really built
BCD — our late founder, John Fentener van Vlissingen. He created a company based
on trust, partnership, and technology development. If you see where we started
nearly fifty years ago — he always stated he doesn’t use any mobile phone, he
doesn’t know how to use it — but he knew how important they are. He knew how
important technology is for the development of our companies. So he invested
early enough, with BCD and in many other areas, in tech companies. Would we do
things differently? We would build this company again on trust, on partnership,
because that has made BCD great. The fact that we focus on service excellence —
what he always promised, focus on the customer. If the customer is happy, and if
the customer gets the service he wants, then you build a strong brand. And
that’s what we’ve done at BCD over the years. Would we do that differently? No, I
don’t think so. Would we use different technologies, Mike? Yes, we would,
because the starting point is a different one. But that doesn’t matter. Our
company has, over the past years, evolved like many others. Think about the time
when agents still wrote tickets by hand — today that’s a technique nobody knows
anymore. Then online booking tools — everything has developed and evolved. So it
will be in the next twenty years. But if you put focus on your teams, your
talents, and on the service delivery, then I think we would build exactly the
same company.

MIKE: Yeah, that’s interesting perspective. And certainly at a time when all the
focus is on platforms and AI — it’s interesting, and maybe even a bit contrarian.
I think it’s a message, or a view, that would resonate really well with a lot of
the people working in the industry. Because we all know, and have been on the
inside to understand — and it’s why we all work in the industry.

STEPHAN: Exactly. And if you go back, Mike — if you see the development of new
players coming into the market — yes, they’ve helped us with a new view on
technology. But at the end of the day, if you come from the technology side and
want to get into service, or if you come more from the service side and develop
into the technology area — what they’ve all found out, even if they might not
say it publicly, but you can see it in how they change their service model, they
need people. They need good people to do the part that technology cannot fix.
And we should not be shy to say that we’re driven by that. We should not ignore
technology, but we should not ignore that we need good people. Our industry
suffered after COVID because we couldn’t find those talents. Where were they?
You remember the times when everybody was crying, “Hey, we need better people —
and where are they all?” So you better take care of the employees you have and
drive good technology into your company. That’s, I think, the secret of the
success.

MIKE: Yeah. One of the things for our industry is that there’s no natural on-ramp
into the travel industry, per se, right? It’s all people with different skills,
backgrounds, and education, who for some reason fall into our industry and then
never leave, right?

STEPHAN: Yes.

MIKE: Which is another testament to your point — people only left during COVID
because they had to, not because they wanted to.

STEPHAN: A hundred percent agree, Mike.

MIKE: Yeah. And it’s a great industry. But there’s no natural way to get here.
So to your point, it does come back to people in so many ways.

STEPHAN: Absolutely. And if you’re in this industry, you never want to lose it.

MIKE: Yes. Oh, absolutely. Well, Stephan, it was great having you here today. A
lot of terrific insight. I appreciate you taking the time to give some
perspective. And again, best fortune for you and for your company as we go
through this really interesting time in our industry — the big inflection point
that we’re in.

STEPHAN: Yes. Thank you, Mike. And sorry that I couldn’t listen to Ed, but it
was great to talk to you. And thanks for all the support to this industry.

MIKE: Thank you. Thank you. All right, take care.

STEPHAN: Take care.

MIKE: Thank you, Stephan. Even if you can’t hear me — nice to see you. Bye-bye.

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HOSTS’ WRAP-UP

ED: Everyone, that was Stephan Baars, CEO of BCD Travel. Mike, I assume you can
hear me now?

MIKE: I can hear you fine.

ED: Yeah. So what did you think?

MIKE: I thought it was fascinating.

ED: Yeah, you were listening. Of course. And any thoughts? What did you think
about the industry? I’ve got to tell you — you always hear about the death of
the GDSs and the legacy players. And then folks like BCD pop up and are doing
innovative things, working with suppliers in unique ways, and providing agencies
with new services. I think he nailed all of that really well. So whenever we get
on with these CEOs of TMCs, I’m always really surprised at how sophisticated
their operations are.

MIKE: Well, in BCD — as, again, they have the benefit of the TMC history, right?
But it’s an interesting point of view, because you have competitors too. Think
about it — between Navan, Amex GBT, and BCD being the three largest global
players. Navan comes purely from a technical, ground-up build. GBT is a bit of a
hybrid — they’ve acquired tech companies over the years, and now with the Long
Lake take-private, they’ve got a huge war chest, focused, at least by every
indication, on AI and creating the next-gen platform view — very technically
oriented. And then here you have BCD, saying, “Okay, yeah, but service still
matters incredibly, so we build our whole business on service, and now we’re
rededicating ourselves to providing service” — however you define that in this
new age. It’s very different. It’s kind of interesting. Everybody’s coming from
their position, or their perceived position, of strength, right? But like we
were writing about over the last few days — now what’s interesting is, you’ve
got BCD, which has tremendous resources behind it as a private company, given
the family and the assets they have at their disposal. You’ve got the
take-private piece now, where they’ve got big capital behind them. And then you
have Navan, whose stock price has now gone up above their issuance price over the
last few months — which is a big indicator of how companies doing what they do
are being valued. It’s different now. It’s not about just traditional travel
metrics — it’s about valuing the platform, valuing the capabilities, making that
transition from traditional TMC economics to a world where the platform might be
effectively valued for the first time.

ED: Yeah. No, I think that’s right. I think earlier I said GDS — I meant TMC, and
I didn’t mean to conflate them. But sometimes in my mind, some of these legacy
TMCs remind me of the way we think of legacy GDSs. I think my point stands, which
is I still see them innovating in the way they connect to and talk to suppliers,
where they support their agency community. And the competitive set — whether it’s
the more modern, built-from-the-ground-up Navans, or your Spotnanas, or directs —
I still think they’re all competing aggressively. And you’re right, I think the
market is showing that in a lot of ways.

MIKE: Yeah. And not to leave out Madrona behind Spotnana, and direct. So it’s an
interesting marketplace, evolving here in the business/corporate travel space.
And one like we haven’t really seen before in terms of valuation — but certainly
capital pouring into the platform side of the equation. So, like we said, very
interesting times, but a great interview. I loved it. And clearly he has a firm
hand on the dynamic. And I love, too — being true to their culture, right?
That’s good to see, for sure. Anyway, great, great stuff.

ED: Good stuff. All right, Mike, that is our show for today. If you have a
challenge in your business, reach out to us at Travel Again Advisory to see how
we can help bring clarity to your business strategy and outcomes. Mike, we’ll
see you back again here for our next episode. Always good to see you.

MIKE: Good to see you.

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END OF TRANSCRIPT