Anyone who has spent time in corporate travel knows the industry’s great contradiction: travellers are marched through airports bristling with modernity, only to end up booking their accommodation on systems that seem to have last been updated during the Howard years. So when Corporate Travel Management (CTM) and DerbySoft announced they’d quietly re-plumbed the pipes behind CTM’s Sleep Space platform, the news earned more interest among insiders than the announcement itself suggested.
The partnership, struck earlier this year, plugs DerbySoft’s distribution muscle directly into Sleep Space, CTM’s increasingly central hub for hotel content. In old-world travel-tech terms, this means fewer intermediaries, fewer mystery gaps in rate data, and fewer moments where a business traveller ends up staring at a hotel confirmation email, wondering why the room type looks suspiciously like a broom cupboard.
“Business travellers expect the same, if not better, seamless experience they enjoy in leisure travel,” said Marwan Batrouni, CTM’s SVP Global Hotel Strategy. Partnering with DerbySoft allows us to directly connect and surface more hotel content in real time, giving travellers access to better rates and ensuring a smoother, more personalised booking journey. This partnership strengthens collaboration with our hotel partners, helping them grow market share and improve customer loyalty.”
It’s a statement that will resonate with anyone who has ever tried to reconcile a corporate hotel invoice. For years, hotels, TMCs and corporates have wrestled with systems that never quite spoke the same language — a game of digital Chinese whispers that led to mismatched rates, missing amenities and the occasional unintentionally creative interpretation of what constitutes a “city view”.
DerbySoft’s solution is to cut out as much of the noise as possible. By linking Sleep Space directly to hotel systems, the platform now pulls in structured data, the sort of clean, dependable information that allows room categories, loyalty inclusions, and dynamic rates to appear as intended, rather than markup-mangled approximations.
“This collaboration gives both TMCs and hotel chains the foundation to compete, grow, and better serve the modern traveller,” said Nadim El Manawy, DerbySoft’s Head of Business Travel Solutions. “With modern infrastructure and high-quality data exchange, we’re setting the stage for the next generation of intelligent, automated, and traveller-centric business travel.”
In the background, the numbers tell their own story. The Global Business Travel Association expects business travel spending to reach US$1.5 trillion by 2027, which explains why both TMCs and hoteliers are hurrying to modernise technology that has long lagged behind consumer travel platforms. After all, leisure travellers have grown accustomed to glossy imagery, real-time rates and loyalty perks that appear before they even think to ask for them. It was only a matter of time before business travellers, especially those living out of suitcases half the year, started asking why their platforms lagged a decade behind.
Here, CTM and DerbySoft hope to offer a course correction. The integration is designed not merely to speed things up but to lay the groundwork for automation at a scale the old systems couldn’t handle. Cleaner data means cleaner reconciliation. Cleaner reconciliation means fewer manual checks. And fewer manual checks means travel managers no longer spend Friday afternoons untangling why a hotel bill shows breakfast three times for a traveller who swears they didn’t eat any of them.
Hotel partners also stand to gain. By transmitting richer content directly into Sleep Space, hotels can showcase differentiators that often get lost in translation, such as environmental certifications, loyalty benefits, amenity detail, and those all-important room images that help travellers avoid surprises when they open the door.
Several major hotel groups are already live in the new environment, with CTM and DerbySoft mapping out a broader rollout through 2026. For corporates, the hope is a more predictable experience across markets. For hotels, it’s a chance to rebuild share in the lucrative corporate channel without the usual fog of outdated distribution layers.
Whether this partnership will solve every quirk of corporate hotel booking is another matter entirely. Travel technology has a long memory, and legacy systems are rarely persuaded to retire quietly. But in an industry that has often relied on incremental fixes, patching, prodding, and politely hoping for the best, CTM and DerbySoft’s collaboration feels like a deliberate step toward something cleaner, sharper and more contemporary.
It won’t attract headlines outside the industry, but those who live and breathe corporate travel will recognise the shift. And if the technology performs as advertised, business travellers may finally notice something they haven’t felt in years when booking a hotel through their corporate tool: a sense that the system is actually working with them, not despite them.
By Karuna Jonhson – (c) 2025
Read time: 4 minutes.
About the Writer
Karuna Johnson has one of those rare careers that could only belong to someone who genuinely loves travel. A Thai national with dual citizenship, she’s as comfortable swapping stories over street food in Bangkok as she is discussing strategy in a Sydney boardroom.
Educated in Thailand and Australia, Karuna speaks several languages fluently, a skill that’s served her well throughout a career spanning the inner workings of three Destination Management Companies and a string of hotels. She’s done everything from sales to admin, always with the kind of quiet competence that keeps things moving while everyone else still finds the coffee.
Her travels have taken her far and wide across Asia, Europe, and the United States, yet she still finds joy in the details: the people, the culture, and the stories behind every journey.
She’s worldly, poised, and precisely the kind of voice Global Travel Media was made for.
