Table of Contents
1. The RFP season that used to decide one number now decides several — and increasingly, a machine reads the bid before a person does.
Corporate negotiated hotel rates — the fixed and dynamic discounts companies secure through the annual RFP cycle — are being renegotiated on more fronts than the rate itself this year. Buyers have moved past experimenting with artificial intelligence in sourcing and are now using it to read and rank bids at scale; one major hotel group has gone further and started building the tools to hand its own properties AI-generated prices to bid with. None of this is the generic story about AI reshaping travel that hotel executives have already heard several times over the past year. It is a specific shift in who sets the number in a corporate rate negotiation, and it changes what a GM, a director of sales and marketing, or a revenue manager should actually be negotiating over this season — starting with the finding, in the newest buyer research from the Global Business Travel Association (GBTA), that fixed rates are growing at roughly a third the pace of dynamic discounts even as most travel managers say they still want both.
2. The RFP cycle is still where the number gets set — and it’s now being read, and soon written, by machines
The corporate transient RFP — the process by which a company solicits room rates from hotels for the year ahead — still runs on a recognisable annual rhythm: requests go out, hotels respond with rate and terms, buyers negotiate and award. Accor’s chief sales and revenue officer, Julien Houdebine, dated that cycle on the record at the GBTA Convention in Chicago in August: hotels respond between September and January, with buyers picking winners on the back end. What has changed is who is doing the reading, and increasingly the writing. More than half of companies (54%) now outsource at least part of their RFP activity to travel management companies or consultants rather than running it in-house, according to GBTA’s 2026 research with Radisson Hotel Group — and on the buyer side, use of AI in the RFP process jumped from 32% in the most recent cycle to an expected 69% in the next one, per the same survey of 258 travel managers.
Hotels are starting to respond in kind. Accor has automated the collection of hotel information from its properties and is now auditing whether negotiated rates actually appear correctly in booking channels; next it plans to automate the flow of requests and bids, and the following year, to hand its hotels AI-generated pricing recommendations for their own corporate bids. Houdebine told Skift the negotiated programs already cover roughly half of Accor’s business travel revenue, and that the process behind them has, until now, been largely manual.
For a commercial team, the consequence isn’t primarily a rate-line effect yet — it’s a system-cost and labour-allocation one. As both sides get faster at comparing bids, the headline discount becomes less of a differentiator because a buyer’s system is comparing it instantly against every other bid it has seen. What’s left for a hotel to actually win on is the part a model doesn’t price well: last-room-availability language, perks, and carve-outs for specific accounts. That is a real shift in where a commercial team’s time is best spent, even before it shows up in achieved rate.
Accor’s pricing-recommendation phase is not yet built or measured, and Houdebine was explicit that the output will be advisory rather than mandatory — “it’s not imposed, of course.” Whether individual hotels override those recommendations, and whether other major groups follow within the next RFP cycle, is not yet answered by anything published. Independent and unbranded properties, which have no equivalent central pricing engine, are worth watching for a different reason: their account-level judgment is the asset a model can’t easily replicate, and it may become a more explicit part of how they sell against branded competitors with automated pricing behind them.
3. Fixed rates are shrinking as a share of RFP activity — but they haven’t stopped anchoring most programs
A fixed, or static, negotiated rate is a flat discount off best available rate (BAR) or a set nightly price, held for the contract year regardless of how demand moves. A dynamic negotiated rate is a discount formula — typically a percentage off whatever BAR happens to be on a given night — so it floats with the market. For a second consecutive year, GBTA’s research found dynamic discounts gaining ground on fixed rates: 49% of hotel programs saw the number of dynamic discounts in their portfolio increase in the past year, versus 17% that saw an increase in the number of fixed rates.
That data point sits in tension with a contrarian read from the sell side. Bjorn Hanson, an adjunct professor at NYU’s Tisch Center of Hospitality, told Business Travel Executive that the broader national trend still favours static, traditional corporate rates, arguing that hotels do not have a strong enough negotiating position to prevail with dynamic pricing more broadly. Practitioners land somewhere between the two readings: consultants at CWT Solutions Group describe dynamic pricing as most useful as a complement in secondary or lower-volume markets, with fixed rates remaining the anchor where a company has real volume to negotiate with — a hybrid rather than a replacement.
The commercial consequence cuts both ways. Dynamic pricing protects a hotel’s rate integrity during high-demand periods, preventing a negotiated discount from underpricing a room during compression — a direct RevPAR benefit. For the buyer, it reintroduces exactly the budget volatility that fixed negotiated rates were designed to remove, which is why GBTA’s 2025 research found 60% of travel managers still describe a hybrid model — combining fixed and dynamic rates at the property level — as their ideal structure, rather than picking a side. Neither format is winning outright, and the evidence doesn’t currently support a claim that either one is.
One structural detail is worth tracking closely: GBTA’s 2026 data found Last Room Availability (LRA) rates remain more common overall than Non-LRA, but that EMEA is shifting toward Non-LRA. Non-LRA lets a hotel cap or close a negotiated rate on its highest-demand dates, which functionally moves even a contractually “fixed” rate closer to dynamic behaviour at the margin. Whether that EMEA shift becomes a wider pattern, and whether hotels start proposing hybrid structures upfront in RFP responses rather than buyers requesting them after the fact, are the two things worth watching into the next cycle.
4. What AI in the RFP actually replaces — and what buyers still won’t hand it
GBTA’s 2026 research breaks buyer comfort with AI down by task, and the pattern is consistent: comfort is high where AI is advising, and drops sharply where it would be transacting.
Buyer comfort with AI in hotel and travel decisions, by task Source: GBTA, “The Evolution of Managed Hotel Programs” (2026), survey of 258 travel managers, April–May 2026
| Task | Buyer comfort |
| Recommending hotels or flights based on negotiated rates | 95% |
| Generating reports | 92% |
| Executing a change or cancellation | 62% |
| Rebooking automatically during a disruption | 57% |
Buyers were specific about where AI still falls short: 62% said it struggles to balance cost against compliance and traveller experience, 60% said it doesn’t reliably understand what travellers actually need, and 55% pointed to weak integration with existing RFP and TMC systems.
For hotels, near-term AI adoption on the buy side is not yet a rate-compression story — it’s an efficiency one. It changes how quickly a buyer’s system can shortlist and compare bids, which is a system-cost and labour question for both sides, not yet a change to the achieved discount itself. The more immediate risk for a hotel is visibility — whether a property makes the AI-generated shortlist at all — rather than the specific number extracted from it.
The gap buyers themselves named — balancing cost against compliance and traveller fit — is precisely the judgment a hotel’s own commercial team is positioned to speak to directly in a proposal. Whether that becomes an explicit selling point in RFP responses over the next cycle, rather than an assumed background factor, is worth watching.
5. The transient rate and the group contract are pulling further apart
A transient corporate rate applies to an individual traveller on a given night, is typically loaded into the GDS or an online booking tool, and is contracted annually. A group or meetings contract is negotiated per event: a block of rooms reserved for specific dates, tied to an attrition threshold — a financial penalty if the group doesn’t fill the block — and often layered with food and beverage or meeting-space minimums that a transient rate never carries.
Lodging is the single largest category of managed corporate travel spend globally, at $461 billion annually, according to GBTA’s Business Travel Index. The group side of that spend is sizeable in its own right: Cvent’s Supplier Network sourced $16.5 billion of group business in 2024, a record that surpassed pre-pandemic levels, with room nights up 16% compared with 2019. And within that spend, room rate is not what’s driving cost growth. GBTA and ALTOUR’s 2027 Global Business Travel Forecast puts average meeting cost per attendee per day at $263 in 2026, up roughly 3%, and names food and beverage and production expenses — not the room rate — as the primary drivers of that increase.
The P&L exposure here is structurally different from transient business. Attrition makes a group contract a direct, contractual RevPAR and occupancy liability for the hotel if the block doesn’t fill — a risk transient rates simply don’t carry, since an unused transient rate costs nobody anything. And because F&B and production costs are now the larger driver of total meeting cost, a hotel’s discipline on banquet and catering pricing matters more to overall contract value in the group segment than its discipline on room rate does — a different margin conversation from the one happening in the transient RFP.
Cvent’s own 2026 global planner research — 1,650 planners surveyed across North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia, Australia and the Middle East and Africa in July 2025 — found 97% of planners say a structured sourcing process saves time or money, with a meaningful share reporting cost or time reductions in the 10–30% range, and roughly three-quarters already using AI somewhere in venue sourcing. Whether the efficiency pressure reshaping transient RFPs starts compressing group sourcing timelines in the same way, and what that does to attrition risk on both sides of the table, is not yet resolved in the data — it’s the thing to watch into the next cycle rather than something that can be stated as settled now.
6. The negotiating climate isn’t the same in every region — and buyers know it
Global hotel rates are forecast to rise 3.7% to an average of $168 per night in 2026, according to GBTA and ALTOUR’s 2027 Global Business Travel Forecast — but that average conceals real regional divergence. The forecast identifies EMEA as the most stable hotel market, with rates rising just 0.6% on softer demand, while Latin America is expected to post the steepest hotel pricing growth as demand outpaces new supply, with APAC and North America positioned between the two.
That divergence shows up directly in how buyers experience sourcing. GBTA’s 2026 survey — whose 258 respondents sit predominantly in North America, Canada and Europe, a sampling detail worth keeping in view when reading regional splits — found 65% of North American travel managers describe the negotiating climate as favourable, against 47% of EMEA-based travel managers.
RFP outsourcing and negotiating climate, North America vs. Europe (2026) Source: GBTA, “The Evolution of Managed Hotel Programs” (2026), survey of 258 travel managers, April–May 2026
| Region | Outsource RFP activity (partial or full) | Describe negotiating climate as favourable |
| North America | 52% | 65% |
| Europe | 64% | 47% |
For a multi-market corporate program, a single RFP template and a single savings target applied worldwide will misjudge conditions somewhere. European commercial teams are negotiating in a climate their own buyers rate as tougher, even as those buyers hand more of the RFP process to third parties — a combination that raises the practical weight of local commercial judgment over a generic global benchmark, and bears directly on the discount off BAR a European property can credibly hold to versus a North American one.
Worth watching is whether the softer-demand, more-outsourced markets — Europe, on this data — end up standardising on a different rate structure altogether. GBTA’s finding that EMEA is shifting toward Non-LRA, set against LRA remaining more prevalent overall, suggests that possibility. If it holds, the corporate negotiated rate stops being one global product and starts being two.
7. The GDS is growing again — and the audit trail behind negotiated rates still isn’t
Negotiated corporate rates are typically loaded into the Global Distribution System (GDS) so that travel management companies and online booking tools can retrieve them at the point of booking. SiteMinder’s Hotel Booking Trends data for 2025 found the GDS was the fastest-growing revenue channel of any major channel it tracks, up 6.6% year-on-year — ahead of direct bookings, which grew 4.3% — a recovery SiteMinder attributes to corporate travel demand and midweek business bookings.
That growth sits alongside a governance gap on the buyer side. GBTA’s 2025 research found 62% of travel managers say non-GDS channels now offer lower prices or more options than their GDS-loaded negotiated rate. Separately, 93% of buyers said their travel management company maintains its own preferred rates layered on top of the company’s negotiated program — but only 39% of programs audit those rates against the company’s own negotiated rate more than once a year.
That combination is a rate-integrity and commission-cost issue as much as a governance one. If a majority of buyers believe non-GDS channels can beat their own negotiated rate, and fewer than four in ten programs are checking regularly, a meaningful share of negotiated rate value may not be reaching the traveller at the point of booking — which affects a hotel’s own achieved-rate discipline as much as it does the buyer’s compliance, since a hotel that negotiates a rate on the assumption of a certain volume has no reliable way to confirm the booking pattern promised at RFP is the one actually occurring.
Rate auditing is a comparison task well suited to the same AI tools now compressing RFP timelines, and buyers have already flagged it as a gap in their own research. Whether that tooling gets pointed at auditing next — and whether the GDS’s renewed growth reflects genuine share gain for the corporate channel or simply overall managed travel volume recovering — are questions the next one or two reporting cycles should start to answer.
