Key Takeaways 

  • Strategic account management goes beyond reporting. It helps travel managers turn programme data and market intelligence into informed decisions. 
  • The right account manager helps tackle real programme challenges, from rising travel costs to non-compliance. 
  • Quarterly Business Insight Reviews should drive action and clear next steps rather. 

Contents

Business travel is growing, so is the complexity 

Business travel confidence is at its highest level of 2026, with 63% of surveyed business travel professionals by GBTA optimistic about the industry outlook over the next 12 months. But growth comes with guardrails. 

Rising travel costs are the biggest influence on buyer travel planning, cited by 69% of buyers, followed by geopolitical uncertainty (45%), internal approvals and travel justification (29%), and traveller safety and security (25%). 

For travel managers, this creates a familiar balancing act: control costs, keep travellers moving, maintain compliance and respond quickly when conditions change. 

Here’s why you need a dedicated person to solve and think forward. 

Account management: from support function to strategic partner 

Travel managers waste up to 30% of their time on avoidable planning pitfalls and manual fixes, according to GBTA. That's a third of a working week lost to problems that a proactive travel partner should have caught before they happened. 

Strategic account management can save this time.  

Having a strategic and experienced account manager means partnering with a person who understands your business, your travel objectives and the pressures influencing your programme, and uses that understanding to help you make better decisions. 

That means: 

FCM's approach is built around this combination of joint business planning, quarterly business insights reviews (QBIRs) and action plans, designed to move programmes from reporting to continuous improvement. Our QBIR score stands at 4.7 out of 5. Here’s what our enterprise customers say about our account managers (AMs) 

97%

agree AMs build quality relationships

93%

agree AMs highlight actionable insight

4.8/5

account management support score

Problems account management can help solve 

1. “I have too much data, but not enough insight.” 

Dashboards can tell you that hotel spend increased. They don't necessarily tell you why. 

This is where an expert adds value. Rather than simply presenting the numbers, they connect the dots across spend, booking behaviour, supplier performance and market conditions to identify what is driving the change and where you can intervene. 

2. “Travellers aren't following the programme, but I don't know why.” 

Compliance is rarely as simple as telling travellers to follow policy.  If travellers are booking outside the programme, your account manager should help uncover the reason, whether it is finding better rates, frustrating booking experience, or restrictive policy limits. 

The solution could involve supplier changes, policy adjustments, better communication or improving the booking experience. 

3. “My travel costs keep rising.” 

Cost pressure is nothing new. The challenge is knowing where you can save without creating new problems elsewhere. Deloitte's 2025 research found that 54% of travel managers cited cost as one of the top three factors restricting travel. 

Move the conversation beyond blanket cost-cutting. 

That could mean identifying high-spend routes, analysing advance-purchase behaviour, reviewing hotel rates, assessing supplier performance or finding opportunities to improve preferred-supplier adoption. 

4. “I can't get everyone aligned.” 

Procurement wants savings. Finance wants visibility. HR cares about traveller experience and duty of care. Senior leadership wants to know whether travel is delivering business value. 

And the travel manager often sits in the middle. 

Your dedicated person can help turn travel data into a story that different stakeholders understand, linking programme performance to financial, operational and employee priorities. 

5. “We're managing a global programme, but every market behaves differently.” 

Global consistency sounds straightforward until you actually manage a global programme. 

Different markets have different suppliers, traveller behaviours, booking preferences, regulations and levels of programme maturity. 

You can get consistency where it matters while recognising local realities. That could mean standardising reporting and KPIs while tailoring supplier strategies, traveller communications or programme initiatives by market. 

6. “We keep identifying the same issues.” 

This is perhaps the biggest sign that account management isn't working strategically. 

If every quarterly meeting highlights the same compliance gap, supplier issue or booking behaviour, but nothing changes, you're reporting a problem, not managing it. 

How to get more value from your account management relationship 

It should be built around your business priorities, not simply the latest travel report. 

Start with clear goals, not a data dump 

Clear goals make account managers accountable. They also turn quarterly reviews into progress checks rather than presentations. 

For instance, instead of saying “improve hotel compliance.” 

Set: Increase preferred hotel adoption from 60% to 75% over the next two quarters. 

Make your QBIRs earn its place 

A quarterly business review shouldn't be just a compilation of everything that happened over the last three months. The conversation should answer four questions: 

  • What happened? 
  • Why did it happen? 
  • What does it mean? 
  • What should we do next? 

Turn data into decisions 

Data on its own doesn't optimise a travel programme. Consider the same example of hotel programme.  

A rise in average daily rate tells you what happened. But combine that with booking behaviour, preferred supplier adoption, location, availability and policy compliance, and you start to understand why it happened. 

Look forward, not just backwards 

The real value of account management lies in moving from hindsight to foresight. Here’s another example: 

Report Hotel spend has increased in London 
Insight More travellers are booking outside of policy 
Foresight Upcoming demand and market rates could put pressure on costs 
Action Review preferred properties, negotiate and address the problem 

That's proactive programme management. 

How to know if you're getting enough from account management 

Use these questions to see whether your account management partnership is genuinely driving your programme forward. 

  • Do we have a documented business plan with clear, measurable objectives? 
  • When was the last time our account manager proactively recommended a change? 
  • Do recommendations have owners and deadlines? 
  • Are we measuring outcomes, not just activity? 
  • Does our resource understand our wider business priorities? 

If the answer to most of these is “not really”, there's probably more value waiting to be unlocked. 

The bottom line 

Your account manager should do more than send you a quarterly report. They should help you figure out what to do next. At FCM, our customers describe their relationship with AMs as a "genuine partnership". Our account management support score stands at 4.8 out of 5. 

Because the real value of strategic account management is turning the right insight into the right action and continuously making your travel programme work harder for your business.