The RFP is broken for travel technology.
The RFP was invented to buy things that arrive on pallets. It cannot pick a partner for a booking system that ships every week, a pricing engine that retrains every night, or an agent that answers a guest at 2:14 a.m. And yet travel businesses keep running RFPs to make the biggest technology decisions of the decade.
What the RFP is actually measuring
An RFP measures three things well: whether a vendor can write, whether a vendor can price, and whether a vendor can withstand a procurement process. None of those correlate with the ability to design a revenue system, land an integration inside an old GDS, or make a general manager trust a model. The RFP is a filter for patience. It is not a filter for outcomes.
The false comfort of comparability
The appeal of the RFP is that it produces a scorecard. Three columns, twenty-seven rows, a weighted total. It looks like a decision. It is actually a spreadsheet. The vendors who score highest are the ones who have written the most RFP responses, not the ones who have shipped the most software into a live PMS on a Friday afternoon.
What to run instead
A working session, then a two-week paid pilot on a real slice of the problem. In week one, the shortlisted teams sit with your revenue managers, your engineers, and your data. In week two, they ship something small into a staging environment that mirrors production. You do not need a scorecard. You need to see the code, meet the people, and watch how they behave when something breaks.
The counter-argument, and why it does not hold
The counter-argument is compliance. Procurement will insist the RFP protects the organisation. It does not. It protects the process. The pilot, structured correctly, produces a paper trail, a working artifact, and three references who have watched the vendor in real conditions. That is a stronger record than any RFP response.
The one page that replaces the RFP
One page. The problem, in plain language. The three outcomes you want in the first ninety days. The systems the work will touch. The name of the executive who will lose sleep if it fails. Send it to four firms. Take the two who write back with questions instead of case studies. Pilot both. Pick the one that made your team better in two weeks.
If you are about to send an RFP for a booking engine, a revenue platform, or an AI initiative, we would rather run a working session. It costs you an afternoon and it saves you a quarter.