Corporate travel is a relationship business. Travel management companies (TMCs) have spent decades earning their clients’ trust: building deep relationships, managing complex itineraries, and being on the other end of the phone at 2 a.m. when a flight gets cancelled. They move billions of dollars in corporate travel spend every year.
But the software behind them hasn’t kept up.
That’s not our take alone. According to GBTA’s own polling, nearly a third of corporate travel buyers are actively reevaluating their TMC this year and they cite the technology, not the service, as the reason.
Today, we’re doing something about it. Engine has acquired Options Travel, a full-service TMC that’s spent more than 30 years earning its reputation on hands-on service and deep client relationships, along with TempoTrip, a group-flights product built by the same family in 2018. This acquisition lays the foundation for a modern online booking tool (OBT) built for TMCs, powered by Engine’s AI.
Getting closer to the problem
Engine and Options Travel started working together nine months ago. The more time we spent with their team, the clearer the pattern became: agents doing brilliant work for their clients while fighting the tools in front of them. Legacy OBTs designed for a different era. Manual work stacked on top of manual work. A great industry running on software that should have been retired a decade ago.
We could have tried to fix that from the outside. But we knew that if we wanted to rebuild the OBT the industry has been asking for, we needed to be in the room where the work happens.
So we brought Options Travel into Engine while keeping everything that makes them great intact.
What we’re building
The result is a new OBT that brings Engine’s AI, automation, and real-time insights directly into managed travel. Instead of forcing agents to jump between siloed systems and repetitive manual work, we’re giving them a single platform that does the heavy lifting:
- Connected platform. Right now, agents toggle between 3-6 disconnected software programs. Engine replaces all of these with one OBT that handles payments, reporting, customer management, and duty of care in one place.
- One dashboard, every client. Just 12% of agents have a consolidated view of their travel program from a single source. With Engine, travel agents will be able to instantly switch between customers, each with their own history, policies, rates, and reports, providing a unified view across their entire book of business, not a patchwork of separate tools.
- Booking times as fast as 2.5 minutes, compared to an industry average closer to 15 minutes.
- Personalization at the client level. Engine automatically applies each client’s negotiated rates, traveler preferences, and travel policies to every search with no manual lookup required.
- Automated disruption handling. Engine flags what needs attention across an agent’s entire portfolio without manual review. According to GBTA, 89% of travel buyers say this kind of automation is exactly what they want.
“Engine is on a mission to power the future of travel, and TMCs are the relationship experts at the center of the industry,” said Elia Wallen, Founder and CEO of Engine. “The technology behind them hasn’t kept up. Getting close to Options Travel showed us exactly where it falls short. TMCs deserve modern technology behind them, and that’s what we’re here to bring.”
“We’ve spent 30 years earning our clients’ trust while the tools available to us lagged behind,” said Brett Buynack, General Manager of Options Travel. “Joining Engine lets us help build what our industry has been waiting for: real technology, for every TMC that’s been underserved by legacy software.”
What’s next
TMCs are the connective tissue of corporate travel. They deserve technology that matches the caliber of the service they provide. This acquisition is the first step toward building it, not from a distance, but from the inside.
Visit us live at the Global Business Travel Association (GBTA) Convention in Chicago, August 3–5. We’ll be at booth #2910 with a live demo of the new OBT. Come say hi.
