Research period: September 21–28, 2026 · Published September 28, 2026 · Source scope: Global
Every week, the TravelBrain team reviews dozens of newsletters and websites to capture the latest developments and trends in travel management and travel technology. This research and the summarization of the key points is carried out with AI support. If you would like to discuss any of these topics with us, or need support on one of them, please let us know.
Executive Summary
This week’s numbers pull in two directions at once. GBTA’s confidence survey shows business travel sentiment at its highest point of 2026 — 63% of buyers are optimistic about the next twelve months — just as an intercepted Houthi missile strike near Riyadh pushed the US State Department to widen its travel warning across nearly the entire Middle East. At Skift Global Forum 2026 in New York, the industry showed no consensus on AI architecture: Sierra founder Bret Taylor argued for a single agent handling the whole journey as “one conversation,” while Expedia CEO Ariane Gorin is deliberately building specialized “point agents” instead of one do-everything assistant, and Amadeus and Spotnana warned that shared interoperability standards are still five to seven years out. Delta, meanwhile, set a notably agency-friendly precedent in NDC by rolling out content across Sabre, Amadeus and Travelport simultaneously without forcing agencies off legacy channels. And fresh Emburse data confirms that cost growth is being driven mainly by travel volume, not just rising prices.
1. Travel Management – General
GBTA survey: business travel confidence hits a 2026 high
GBTA’s latest confidence survey shows a sharp turnaround: 63% of business travel buyers are now optimistic about the next twelve months, up from 41% in April, while only 7% are pessimistic, down from 24%. Buyers expecting more trips in 2026 rose to 45% and those expecting higher spend to 56%, with Europe posting the sharpest swing of any region — optimism jumped from 21% to 55%.
BCD Travel builds emissions data and carbon fees directly into Tripsource
BCD Travel has expanded its Tripsource platform with CO2 estimates for flights and sustainability guidance for hotels, adding the ability to collect carbon fees and benchmark sustainability performance directly inside the booking workflow.
Bottom line: sentiment is clearly improving, but cost pressure and geopolitical uncertainty remain the real forces shaping the travel program agenda — and with BCD Travel’s Tripsource expansion, sustainability reporting is moving from nice-to-have to a core TMC platform requirement.
2. Online Booking
Perk and Katanox streamline hotel payments for booking platforms
Perk (formerly TravelPerk) has partnered with Katanox to handle hotel booking, payment and settlement through an account-to-account payment system, aimed at reducing corporate hotel programs’ reliance on virtual credit cards.
Skift Global Forum: the booking journey keeps getting longer, and the AI trust gap stays wide
The average booking journey has grown from roughly 45 touchpoints in 2018 to about 65 today, with one in three steps actually pushing travelers away from a purchase decision. Over 70% of travelers now use AI for research and comparison, yet fewer than 16% feel comfortable booking directly through an AI tool, and more than half rebook after their initial purchase.
Expedia bets on many specialized AI agents instead of one
Expedia has joined Meta’s Muse AI agent while keeping its existing integrations with Google AI Mode, ChatGPT, Claude and Amazon’s Alexa. CEO Ariane Gorin doubts that most bookings will become fully conversational end-to-end experiences, and Expedia has instead built specialized “point agents” for individual planning tasks rather than one all-purpose assistant.
Bottom line: booking technology is moving away from the idea of one dominant AI interface and toward specialized multi-agent setups, leaner payment processing, and a sharper focus on what happens after the booking is made — visibility in search alone no longer counts as a differentiator.
3. TMCs
Travelogix and Kudos choose interoperability over a merger
UK-based data specialist Travelogix and Brisbane-based Kudos Travel Technology announced a strategic partnership that connects their platforms more closely for TMCs, including single sign-on already piloted with Australian TMC Sanford Travel. The initial focus is the UK, Europe, Africa and Asia, with expansion planned into ANZ and North America.
GBTA: TMC revenue outlook brightens faster than buyer spending appetite
The same GBTA survey finds 48% of suppliers and TMCs now expect revenue growth in 2026, up sharply from 35% in April.
Bottom line: a quiet week for major TMC deals or acquisitions — the real movement is happening on two quieter fronts: technology vendors choosing interoperability over consolidation, and TMC revenue optimism running ahead of clients’ own spending confidence.
4. Expense Management
Emburse data: travel volume, not just pricing, is driving cost growth
New Emburse analysis of roughly $9.1 billion in expense data (January–July 2026) shows total enterprise spend up 4.8% year-over-year. Transportation costs grew 26.7% and accounted for 42% of total dollar growth despite being just 11% of overall spend — purchase volume climbed 18.7%, far outpacing the 6.7% rise in average claim value. Airfare alone drove 75.8% of transportation growth, led by British Airways (+42.7%), United (+34.0%) and Southwest (+32.2%).
IRS sets new per diem rates for 2026–2027
The IRS updated lodging, meal and incidental expense per diem rates effective October 1, 2026: high-cost localities rise to $329/day (from $319) and other localities to $230/day (from $225); the transportation industry rate becomes $80 within the continental US and $86 outside it.
Bottom line: volume growth, not fare inflation, is the real story behind rising costs — and October 1 brings a concrete, technical to-do for every expense team with US exposure.
5. Travel Risk Management
Middle East escalation: US widens travel warning across nearly the whole region
After a September 19 Houthi ballistic-missile and drone attack was intercepted near Riyadh — damaging a fuel depot near King Khalid International Airport and targeting oil facilities in Yanbu — the US State Department significantly broadened its regional travel warnings. Eight to ten countries are now affected: Israel and Jordan at Level 3 (“Reconsider Travel”), and Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Gaza and Yemen at Level 4 (“Do Not Travel”); the FAA maintains Iraqi airspace closures and Persian Gulf route restrictions, and carriers keep postponing the resumption of flights to Dubai, Doha and Tel Aviv.
GBTA: geopolitical uncertainty becomes a mainstream buyer concern
In GBTA’s confidence survey, 45% of buyers now name geopolitical uncertainty as one of their top two concerns for the next twelve months, trailing only rising travel costs at 69%.
Bottom line: the escalating Middle East situation remains this week’s dominant risk factor — and the fact that geopolitical uncertainty now ranks as a top-two concern for buyers themselves, per GBTA, shows risk and cost are converging into a single conversation.
6. NDC (New Distribution Capability)
Delta brings NDC to Sabre, Amadeus and Travelport at the same time
Delta Air Lines will roll out NDC content across all three major GDS platforms — Sabre, Amadeus and Travelport — by year-end 2026, alongside select direct connections and a partnership with Amex GBT. Launch capabilities include flight shopping, ticketing, cancellations, private fares, ARC settlement and corporate priority benefits; unlike American Airlines, Delta explicitly will not force agencies off their existing distribution channels.
Bottom line: a quiet week for NDC overall — but Delta’s choice to serve all three GDS simultaneously without forcing a migration could push more airlines toward the cooperative path rather than the confrontational one.
7. AI in Travel
Sierra’s Bret Taylor: AI agents keep failing because of org charts, not technology
At Skift Global Forum 2026, Sierra founder and OpenAI chairman Bret Taylor argued that AI agents can already manage an entire customer journey as one continuous conversation — but most companies waste that capability by still routing customers between departments. His summary line: “Shipping your org chart should never, ever, ever happen in the world of AI.”
Agentic AI in travel still lacks the infrastructure and standards to scale
Spotnana CEO Steve Singh says post-booking servicing accounts for 90% of travel’s cost structure and 90% of its dissatisfaction — exactly where agentic AI promises the biggest return. Amadeus’s Elena Avila countered that the industry still lacks shared standards for identity, data and interoperability, noting travel has “70 years of history … of doing the exact opposite” and needs five to seven years to catch up; an audience poll found 40% doubted shared standards would arrive by 2030 against 34% who agreed.
World Tourism Day 2026 puts AI and digital identity at the center
Marking World Tourism Day 2026, WTTC President Gloria Guevara said AI and digital identity are redefining how the world travels, with the destinations and businesses that lead this shift shaping the sector’s future. Travel & tourism contributed roughly $11.7 trillion to global GDP in 2025 (10.3% of the world economy, one in nine jobs); UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned that unchecked AI risks funneling travelers toward a handful of popular destinations at the expense of lesser-known ones.
Bottom line: from Sierra to Amadeus, Spotnana, UNWTO and WTTC, AI in travel is being treated as a structural infrastructure question at every level — the real brake isn’t appetite, it’s the execution gap in data, identity and interoperability.
Trend Analysis & Outlook
Cross-cutting trend 1 – Sentiment and risk are diverging: GBTA’s confidence index hits a 2026 high just as the Middle East escalation pushes US travel warnings across nearly the entire region. For travel programs, that means planning for growth and tightened risk management at the same time, not one after the other.
Cross-cutting trend 2 – AI in travel has split into competing architectures: the end-to-end super-agent (Sierra/Taylor), the multi-agent model built on specialized point agents (Expedia), and the infrastructure-first view from Amadeus and Spotnana, which insists standards and servicing capability come first. The one point of agreement: the biggest near-term payoff sits in post-booking service, not booking itself.
Cross-cutting trend 3 – Interoperability over coercion is becoming the pattern: in NDC (Delta lets agencies choose rather than forcing them), in TMC technology (Travelogix and Kudos partnering rather than merging), and in AI standards (Amadeus pushing for shared standards over walled gardens). Anyone negotiating contracts right now should be pushing suppliers to commit to that same cooperative stance.
Outlook: Over the coming weeks, expect more detail to emerge from Skift Global Forum coverage, the WTTC Global Summit in Malta (October 7–9) to set the next beat in the AI and digital-identity debate, and either further escalation or the first signs of stabilization in Middle East travel warnings ahead of the fourth quarter. The new US per diem rates also take effect October 1, which should translate into practical expense-system updates in the days ahead.
