The Secret Goldmine: Data support team

Insight

What is MCP? The standard reshaping travel management

MCP (Model Context Protocol) is an open standard that lets AI assistants such as Claude, ChatGPT, and Microsoft Copilot connect directly to business systems.  

For travel management, this means booking data, spend reports, and policy recommendations become accessible through conversational AI tools that you’re already using for work, rather than requiring a separate login to a dedicated platform. 

Key Takeaways 

  • MCP is a connectivity standard, not a single product. 
  • Faster access to interpreted data changes how quickly you can act on it. 
  • When connected up to other MCPs, your travel management data becomes even more powerful.  

Travel data lives everywhere. Bookings sit in one system, expense records sit in another, and policy compliance gets tracked somewhere else entirely. Pulling those threads together into a single, useful answer has traditionally meant exporting data, building a report, and interpreting it yourself. 

MCP changes that structure; bringing the data to the tools you already use every day. 

Contents

What does MCP actually do? 

MCP is a connectivity standard, not a single product. Before its release, every AI assistant needed a custom-built integration for every tool it connected to, which quickly built up when you think about the data sources and tools you use. MCP replaces that with a single shared connection method: one server, built once, that any MCP-compatible AI assistant can use. 

As Daniel Senyard, SVP AI Innovation & Commercialisation, explains “Everything usually is connected via APIs, and each API has a certain functionality.  So, let's say my policy API can only pull my policy. My book API allows me to book, but there's a separate API for search, there's a separate API for approval. An MCP server aggregates all these different APIs so they're now available through a single connection.”  

For travel programmes, this means your travel data and functions are one of the many data sources accessible in the AI assistant you use at work. 

What benefits does MCP bring to corporate travel management? 

It’s largely accessibility. Instead of having to log into disparate systems, you can instead do your travel tasks within channels you already use, like Claude, ChatGPT, Teams and Slack.  

Connecting FCM’s MCP, for example, allows you to report on travel data, and book trips with FCM through these channels.  

What’s also game-changing is that you can connect as many data sources as you need. Your travel data becomes even more powerful once it’s matched up with your expenses, CRM or HR data. 

Why does this matter for your organisation? 

Faster access to interpreted data changes how quickly you can act on it. A rate cap recommendation that once took days to build from an export can now be generated, justified, and drafted into a memo within a single conversation.  

If you decide to connect up different MCPs, you open up even more possibilities. You can compare whether those that travel generate more sales for the company or ask where travel and expense data doesn’t reconcile.  

That speed extends to the traveller experience too: booking questions answered inside a familiar chat tool removes the friction that once meant logging into a separate OBT. 

 Daniel added: “It's important because it allows you to potentially bring your travel programme to your travellers and bookers without requiring old existing tech. So, you can search and book in Claude or Teams, you don't need all those individual APIs that are built into your online booking tool.” 

The future of travel data is conversational 

MCP marks a shift away from juggling multiple systems and bringing business travel tasks into familiar AI and conversational tools.  

Organisations evaluating how AI fits into their travel programme should start by asking how they’d like travel to be accessed – both from a strategy perspective and also for your travel bookers and travellers.  

Read more about MCP and travel management