Alexis Sisko, Managing Consultant, Hotel Spend Management
As hotel suppliers increasingly lean into bundled pricing, corporate travel buyers are facing a new challenge: determining whether those included benefits are delivering real value.
Complimentary breakfast, enhanced cancellation flexibility and other bundled amenities can make a negotiated hotel rate look more attractive on paper, but the true impact lies in whether your travelers actually use them.
The great hotel sourcing contradiction
BCD’s Travel Buyer Insights paint a fascinating—and somewhat paradoxical—picture: while 86% of travel buyers remain firmly anchored to cost control as their top sourcing priority, an overwhelming 97% are calling for greater flexibility in hotel cancellation policies, and 96% are seeking richer amenities and services. It’s a tension that feels almost electric, like competing forces pulling the industry in different directions. When I reflect on these numbers, it’s hard not to hear a quiet chorus of alarm bells. For years, we’ve debated the “death” of the traditional hotel RFP, and these strategic contradictions only amplify that narrative—especially as 61% of buyers look to AI to automate and simplify sourcing, and nearly half are exploring whether multi-year agreements provide stability.
As hotel sourcing ramps up, these competing priorities raise an important question: will more built-in benefits automatically translate to more value? To find the answer, we need to look beyond what’s promised during the RFP and examine what drives value once a hotel program goes live.
Perceived vs. realized value
During the RFP, suppliers position breakfast, Wi-Fi and cancellation flexibility as incremental benefits. They check a box indicating that these amenities have been bundled into the negotiated corporate rate at no additional charge, and they provide the market value of each amenity. The travel management company then uses these market values to report the forecasted incremental amenity value. Now here’s where the first potential contradiction comes into play. Buyers want and expect to receive a forecasted savings report at the conclusion of the RFP, but they don’t always validate incremental amenity reporting throughout the program year. Without traveler utilization reporting once the new program goes live, incremental amenity reporting reflects perceived value rather than realized value! In other words, it measures what your travel program could save, not necessarily what you did save.
The benchmarking dilemma
Let’s run with the notion of perceived value versus realized value. As part of ongoing hotel program optimization, Advito uses a Hotel Performance Dashboard to track the value of negotiated corporate rates against the publicly available market rates. If a market rate softens significantly, a corporate rate may no longer be competitive. So consider this: When a travel management company reports on the negotiated corporate rate discount off the market rate – do you trust the benchmark data enough to approve various optimization actions – or do you find yourself justifying a rate with little to no reported value against the benchmark data, simply because it includes breakfast and 6pm cancellation?
This is where perceived value can distort rate benchmarking. If a corporate rate is inclusive of complimentary amenities, then those amenity values should not be factored into a benchmark comparison against the market rate, which is exclusive of amenities. After all, until travelers actually use those amenities, that value hasn’t been realized.
Breakfast included, but at what cost?
Advito’s analysis of select 2026 hotel RFP data indicates that 64% of breakfast-exclusive negotiated rates were lower than comparable breakfast-inclusive rates, with an average savings of 6.9%. While these rates were not offered concurrently at the same properties, the variance observed suggests a meaningful opportunity to drive incremental program value through a more targeted approach to breakfast inclusion. For our purposes, let’s say a breakfast-inclusive rate is $200. The breakfast-exclusive rate would be $186, which represents savings of $13.80. If the hotel indicated that the breakfast value is $17.60 in their RFP response, then the buyer would need to ensure 78% breakfast utilization to break even with the $13.80 in additional costs that were baked into their corporate rate, under the guise of being a complimentary value add. Breakfast utilization over 78% would generate savings, but anything less would result in lost savings. In this example, the buyer loses money every time a traveler doesn’t use the included breakfast. Or worse, if your travel policy allows travelers to expense breakfast elsewhere, your organization may be paying for breakfast twice, once (unused) through the negotiated rate and again through traveler reimbursements.
Cancellation flexibility: value-add or overvalued?
In our quest to assess perceived value versus realized value, we analyzed over 500K BCD transactions and found that only 18% of cancellations occurred on the same day as arrival, while 58% of cancellations occurred three or more days from arrival. When comparing this to select 2026 RFP data, which revealed that 43% of the rates inclusive of “other” cancellation policies were lower than comparable rates inclusive of same day cancellation policies, we found yet another case where organizations may be paying a premium for a benefit that is rarely used in practice.
Maximize the value of your corporate hotel strategy
In short, a higher negotiated rate with “included” amenities is still a higher cost if those benefits go unused or fail to influence traveler behavior. The definition of value may evolve, but the math hasn’t changed. And in today’s hotel sourcing environment, the winners will be the buyers that prioritize realized value instead of perceived value. Contact our team today to see how our hotel sourcing experts can help you drive real value to your corporate hotel program.