The op-ed went on to say the universal profile should include more information than the GDS would permit, citing incident tracking, traveller history, promotion history and even biometric imaging files. But Menkes’ point wasn’t about security regulations as much as it was about traveller centricity in travel management. Plenty of sophisticated travel buyers have since lobbied for the concept, but when it came down to execution, basically nothing happened.

Why bring this up 21 years later?

Profile storage, since the 1970s, was tied to the GDSs. Updates were gleaned from data entries made by agents when travellers would call them up (or, later, email them) to initiate a booking. They confirmed minimal profile data (official first and last names, travel document numbers, date of birth, email address and, ideally, payment information) to facilitate a booking and reduce keystrokes on an agency desktop. An agency desktop technology would ping that information back over to the GDS and keep that traveller profile updated.

When online self-booking tools came along, the best came with a bilateral, automated GDS profile updating capability. That technology is still broadly used today and is part of Concur Compleat mid-office and quality control technology. According to a few industry veterans, the bilateral profile updating function was a big reason Concur got so much traction as a booking tool provider in the early days.

So if the profile required to make an actual booking is housed in the GDS and the information fields, as originally lamented by Menkes, are so limited and mainly used to reduce the keystrokes for phone-assist agents working within the GDS channel, why should travel managers even care?

Because in a world where GDS-based bookings in EDIFACT are getting fragmented by New Distribution Capability, direct-connect supplier strategies and with various rate options continuously dropping out of traditional managed travel channels, travel programmes need profiles to sit outside the GDS channel, to connect to more suppliers and systems and to provide more (and better) information via those connections.

If they can’t, travel programmes risk alienating their business travellers by becoming the least convenient and possibly the costliest channel through which travellers can book their business trips.

That’s the minimum profile systems should be doing. The maximum – according to a lot of industry optimists – could be so much more.

Profile pragmatism underpins performance

“Profiles are the underrated core piece of this ecosystem, and they often get neglected,” says ZS Associates global meetings and travel manager Suzanne Boyan, BTN’s 2018 Travel Manager of the Year and well-known travel ecosystem innovator. With travel managers like Boyan looking for differentiators, TMCs are realising it’s an area where they need to invest.

Once profile management leans away from the GDS, TMCs can maintain richer traveller profiles with additional data that informs how that profile is activated for the travel programme. Certainly, it can house more traveller information like loyalty numbers, like payment, like mobile phone, like what some in the industry call “fluff and stuff” such as aisle or window seat preference or location in a hotel like upper floor or near an elevator – and all that information becomes important for more sophisticated service levels for the traveller.

A profile management system also should be able to intake human resources data like an individual’s title, level within a company, cost centres associated with that individual’s travel and other details that paint a fuller picture of how that person operates within a given organisation – to trigger applicable policies based on travel frequency or seniority.

All that may sound simple, but the process of keeping this information current often is not simple. Programme managers consistently lament issues in how to urge travellers to update their profiles via the TMC, especially infrequent travellers. For frequent travellers as well, items like mobile numbers or new loyalty affinities change often and remembering when (and how) to update it can be challenging. Job promotions or division changes can also change how policy applies to the individual or how the company pays for an individual’s travel. If those kinds of updates are neglected, problems start. And it happens all the time.

Montreal-based Encore Travel Inc. is one midsize travel agency that has built its own profile management system. SVP of commercial partnerships Jake Jonassohn told BTN that the Zii profile system concentrates a lot on the HR piece and creating an administration hierarchy that allows individuals and team leaders, or people with roles like risk management, to access certain pieces of the profile that pertain to them.

"We see this as more of a business problem and not a travel problem," says Jonassohn. "It's sexier to think of it as a booking tool problem or a travel problem, but it's really not. There are a lot of features in Zii not just travel and booking... [there's] reporting, duty of care and there's a new communication feature we just came out with. What's interesting about every single one of those features is actually not the feature itself. The feature almost doesn't matter. What's interesting is that it uses the same back-end logic to give visibility and access to the [profile] and unlock the right elements to enable the feature."

By giving access to the travel profile and certain level of reporting to each individual employee, "they can sort of become the travel manager in their own life," says Jonassohn.

Deeper understanding will drive intuitive service

Gant Travel CEO Patrick Linnihan is another profile optimist. Linnihan, during the pandemic, made the decision to invest in customer relationship management technology Salesforce to underpin the agency’s profile management.

“When you think of a great travel agent, they are reading your mind about what the right recommendation might be. How do they know these things?” says Linnihan. “They know this because they know where your company travels. They know where you've travelled in the past. They can predict what is the appropriate purchase.”

All of that is in data, he says, predicting that the traveller profile in the hands of a CRM “becomes this endless string of not just static data or items that are manually changed.” Instead, it becomes a dynamic picture of who that traveller is and how they are travelling, both at a point in time and through their travel history. For example, he says, “If the traveller moves from Detroit to Denver, it soon becomes clear in the data that the agency or booking tool “should stop offering this person Delta. Offer them United.”

That’s a simple example, he underscores. “With machine learning and large language models, [we will get] the ability to take a field of data that no human would ever imagine” and infer their choices, informed by policy on the one hand and perhaps the choices of other travellers from their company or division, or their own dynamic history.

“We have a tool right now, I don't want to go into it too much because I'm not ready to say it's released, but it's using every traveller in the company's purchasing habits to predict what you are going to buy,” explains Linnihan. “It’s a string of data bigger than any [profile] and, here’s the key, it has both structured and unstructured data on it. The question then becomes ‘Is the TMC sophisticated enough to work with it?’ That's going to be a differentiator.”

Gant isn’t the only TMC pursuing such a strategy. Jonassohn says Encore is on a similar track, with the rich data housed within the Zii profile system changing the way Encore is thinking about how the search function should operate.

“To initiate a [travel] search, I don’t actually need to know what policy you are in – I don’t need to know [that much] about you. All we are doing is populating where you want to go,” says Jonassohn. “If I can actually take the search function out of the booking engine and bring it into Zii, I can now enhance the search with everything Zii knows about you [in terms of] loyalty, location, your last trip, even where your colleagues have gone – I can do anything I want because I have all the information about you. Only then will we shoot that back to the booking engine. The search should be enhanced to drive the experience.”

Does this really belong in the profile?

“TMCs often struggle with profiles because [the data] comes from all over the place, [it is] not structured and it causes a lot of errors [and it is] a lot of manual work to clean up that mess,” says Helmut Pilz, CEO of Midoco, the parent company of profile management system Umbrella Faces, whose company specialises in cleaning up that data and bringing it into a structured format that is usable for his travel management customers.

Umbrella has grown from housing three million profiles just a few years ago to housing 12 million today – clear evidence of how TMCs have shifted their focus to traveller profiles to gain more nuanced control of their servicing.

Umbrella provides a hub-and-spoke approach, with the profile at the centre of the ecosystem and currently linking out to 70 different stakeholders to give access to profile data. It provides data security cover and complies with Europe’s general data protection regulation (GDPR), which can be a heavy lift for TMCs.

Pilz is happy to leave that vision of deep traveller history and colleague booking patterns with innovators who potentially link up to an Umbrella profile but remain separate from it. It has built developer APIs so other system innovators can make it happen.

That’s an important difference in the vision of the independent profile provider versus a proprietary TMC-owned profile management system like that of Linnihan or Jonassohn. For some TMCs – and Encore seems to be one of these, at least for now – that profile system will inform only the technology universe that TMC controls. With the Gant system built on Salesforce, it could have potential development reach to providers outside the TMC, but it’s up to the TMC to decide how that will evolve.

Who owns the profile – and what that means

And now we come to the question of ownership. The thing about profiles is that they are housed “in a place.” In reality, everyone has profiles everywhere, right? An Amazon profile, airline and hotel profiles based on a loyalty number and status, an OpenTable profile that serves restaurant recommendations. A Spotify profile tracks musical tastes and serves adjacent content. As individuals continue to use those vendors and service providers, the more those entities know about the user, the deeper a user’s “trust” level becomes with that vendor and the more data they have to refine their offerings to that person.

To bring that concept into the immediate travel world, every supplier loyalty programme is fundamentally a profile programme amassing reams of data about individual travellers to tailor products and offers to them, and thereby, “owning the customer.”

Every piece of the travel ecosystem wants that ownership. The GDS had it first, but without maturing what the profile could do it has largely lost that profile ownership competition to the travel management company and possibly to a booking tool. Everyone is competing with supplier loyalty programmes, and sharing that data with other players risks losing that power position. There are two other potential players in this competition, however.

Umbrella has “eaten up massive market share” among midsize TMCs, according to Gant’s Linnihan. But TMCs aren’t Umbrella’s only clients. “We do also have some corporate travel department (CTD) clients,” says Pilz.

So we arrive back to the world of Andy Menkes, who was the first travel manager to avail his employer of a new accreditation option provided by Airlines Reporting Corp. in 1999 in the United States that allowed corporations ostensibly to act as their own TMC by establishing a CTD. He was followed to the table by big names like Microsoft, Chevron, Charles Schwab, Federated Department Stores and Wal-Mart. All those companies today have abandoned the approach. Boeing was the single holdout among companies in BTN’s Corporate Travel 100 list this year still to function in this manner.

More companies, however, are looking at the components of the travel ecosystem with an eye to a CTD-like approach, as new technologies and philosophies around open architecture in the travel ecosystem emerge. They also are evolving their thoughts around how profiles get positioned in their future travel management strategies.

“We got our ARC accreditation, but we decided not to become a CTD,” says ZS Associates' Boyan, who revealed earlier this month that the firm has signed with DirectTravel for a programme the travel team is rolling out from now until February.

“We still knew that profiles remained on our list of things to look at because the value of the profile is that it houses all the information about a person. It stems from the GDS and with a profile management system, it works in conjunction with these other things. But if you remove the GDS from being the heart of your programme, where does that information live and who owns it?

“TMCs want to own it because there's value for them, if they can service well,” she says. “Some travel managers want to own it, and those may be the ones who opt for the CTD model or something similar.”

Menkes still sees the value in that CTD model or something similar. “If something happens to your TMC, or if you decide you want to change service providers, you change. Friday night to Monday morning, if you have to. If the corporation owns the data and the profiles, they have the power to do that.”

The power of the individual

Boyan wants to take a different tack, though she emphasised her research is still evolving. “We've been thinking about it incorrectly as per usual in our industry,” she says. “We've outsourced profiles and their management to various entities, and those entities don't want to talk to one another because they want to control the customer or they don't want to be responsible for sharing that personal data. One way to solve that is for the traveller to own it and say, ‘Yeah, I want my new company to have this information so I can be a productive workforce member and I want these travel vendors to have it because I’m loyal to them and they provide better service to me when they have certain information about me’.”

Boyan says ZS was in conversation with Traverse to provide a mechanism like this. One reason ZS went to Direct Travel was to take advantage of the open architecture that would allow the company to choose its own profile management system partner. “They have their own profile management, but their technology set-up enables me to bring in my preferred technology if I decide to,” she says.

Travlr ID is another provider poised to serve this traveller-owned-profile market. It has made inroads with Amadeus Cytric as a new member of their partner network. Just recently, the company announced a partnership with Pilz’s Umbrella Faces to bridge Travlr ID’s blockchain-based technology into a broader TMC universe, should the latter see fit to adopt such tools.

Chief commercial officer and former EY travel innovation manager Ian Spearing says the past year has been spent “hardening” the technology in preparation for accelerating partnerships and corporate clients in 2025.

“We’re having the kind of technology discussions with travel agencies and technology providers in the travel industry about how we help enable or improve some challenges they have around profiles,” says Spearing. “Whether that’s adding modules of tech into their current systems or looking at replacing what systems they offer out to their customers. Finally, we’ll be going direct to corporates and talking through different use cases for companies looking to slightly fragment their technology stacks and own certain elements of their technologies that could enable a different type of programme, with better personalisation, more efficiencies or different payment options.”

In a Travlr ID world, the individual maintains the core data of name, birth date, email address, phone number, payment information, but then also can add those loyalty numbers, travel preferences and health or other information at different levels of transparency. It’s the task of potential recipients of that data to unlock retail options or services based on whether or not the traveller will release those data points to them. “That’s where the competitive edge will come for those forward-thinking [travel] suppliers,” says Spearing.

Travlr ID envisions a secondary control panel for the corporate side of the profile that interfaces with HR systems and other internal sources of data. “From a corporate perspective, they would give API access into their HR systems or allow an extract direct from an API into our dashboard,” says Spearing. “That dashboard would be stored in the customer infrastructure –we don’t store the data. Our blockchain simply transacts the data. And the company has control over the corporate data, obviously, not the traveller.”

Spearing, like Pilz, sees the profile as being relatively simple in terms of the data fields – though they could be numerous; he does not envision Linnihan’s infinite data string or booking history. “Because that really is influenced by the company – and their specific programme, policies, etc. As a result, it probably shouldn’t follow a person to the next employer.” 

Andy Menkes, now the long-standing CEO of Partnership Travel Consulting and arguably the guy who started this whole conversation in the first place, does not agree. He positions the traveller as the control centre of all travel-related information with singular ability to grant or deny access.

I want all my trip history in my travel profile, but my company can only the see the business travel,” he says. After all, he added, corporate travellers are leisure travellers too. “If I own the profile and I’m granting the access, why shouldn’t I have all that?”

How it all plays out is anyone’s guess, but buyers are getting more choices and they should understand the implications of how they choose. For sure, the profile should not be overlooked – whether a buyer is plugging in their own choice or sourcing a TMC that is providing profile-activated services. Because what was once the utilitarian profile may ultimately end up being the kingmaker of corporate travel ecosystem players.