As Chinese companies accelerate their global expansion, demand for cross-border business travel, overseas assignments, and corporate group travel continues to grow, creating a new growth opportunity for China’s TMCs in the international hotel sector.
However, at the 2026 TravelDaily Digital Intelligence Conference · Greater Bay Area, Baichuan Hu, Global Channel Director of Convergent International Travel, shared insights drawn from a year of hands-on experience serving 393 TMCs across China. He noted that the industry has moved beyond a growth model driven by resource access and price competition.
Today, most TMCs still face major challenges, including underdeveloped fulfillment systems, limited technology capabilities, and insufficient cross-border service experience. The ability to provide stable, controlled, and low-risk cross-border delivery has become a key dividing line in future TMC competition.
Most Chinese TMCs still lack the ability to anticipate risks in overseas service environments. Many focus only on completing basic processes such as booking, confirmation, and voucher issuance, without proactively screening for less visible service and experience risks, informing clients in advance or taking preventive measures.
As a result, even when problems are not caused by the TMC or its supply chain partners, TMCs often have to step in and resolve disputes in order to maintain corporate client relationships and protect service reputation. This forces them to absorb unnecessary service costs and compensation losses.
The situation — where TMCs are held accountable despite complying with procedures, and forced to compensate despite not being at fault — has become a common challenge in cross-border hotel services.
At a deeper level, this is not an isolated issue involving individual bookings, but evidence of a systemic capability gap across the industry.
Many TMC teams have built strong expertise in domestic corporate travel but lack in-depth knowledge of overseas hotel room-type definitions, display conventions, property standards and service practices. They have yet to establish risk assessment frameworks tailored to cross-border scenarios, making it difficult to address information gaps in customer expectations before problems arise.
