Most enterprise RFPs in travel and travel insurance are decided in the weeks before drafting begins, by whether the business behind the bid has aligned on what it is offering and why.

An analysis of why enterprise bids and tenders in travel and travel insurance distribution weaken inside the bidding business, what evaluation panels are really testing, and how a five-layer alignment stack produces a response buyers can believe.

By Matt Endycott, Founder and Managing Director, Hartmann Advisory

Executive summary

Enterprise RFPs in travel and travel insurance are usually treated as document exercises, with teams investing heavily in the writing, the design and the compliance matrix. Yet the outcome of an enterprise RFP is largely shaped before drafting begins, in the alignment the bidding business did or did not do. Sophisticated buyers are scoring the coherence of the business behind the response far more than the quality of its prose.

The stakes are rising because these processes have become more consequential and less frequent. An insurer bidding for a retail travel group, an airline, a bank or a loyalty program is competing for an embedded or white-label arrangement that will run for years, and an incumbent displaced today may wait five to seven years for another chance.

Buyers in these processes are purchasing certainty. When leadership, pricing, operations and the proposal team work separately, the response reads as complete but incoherent, which is exactly what evaluation panels, clarification rounds and orals are designed to surface. The strongest bids therefore align five layers before a word is written, namely the commercial thesis, the pricing logic, the delivery architecture, the governance story and the executive narrative.

That work costs days of executive time in the first fortnight and saves weeks of late rewriting. For travel brands running the process, the same logic applies in reverse, because an RFP designed to test coherence finds a better partner.

This analysis is written for the leaders at insurers, underwriting agencies and assistance providers who bid for enterprise mandates, and for the airlines, retail travel groups, financial institutions and loyalty programs that run them. Its author has led distribution and partnerships from inside the businesses that compete for these mandates, as Head of Travel at Allianz Partners, Head of Distribution at nib Travel and Head of Partnerships at Europ Assistance, now Redion, where he led a global travel insurance program for a major travel retailer across Australia, New Zealand, North America, the UK and Europe.

In brief

• Enterprise RFPs are treated as document exercises, yet their outcome is largely shaped before drafting begins by the commercial clarity of the bidding business.
• Buyers in travel and travel insurance are purchasing certainty that the commercial model, the governance and the implementation path will hold well beyond signature.
• A response assembled by functions working separately reads as complete but incoherent, and evaluation panels are built to detect it.
• The strongest tender responses align five layers before writing, from the commercial thesis and pricing logic to delivery, governance and executive narrative.
• Orals and clarification rounds test coherence, so a misaligned business can survive a written round but rarely survives the room.
• Travel brands get a better partner when they design the RFP to test whether each bidder believes its own bid.

Why enterprise RFPs are lost before the document is written

The document illusion

The typical bid process concentrates its effort on the document. A bid team assembles pricing, credentials, product detail, timelines and governance language, and the business invests heavily in the quality of the submission because that investment is visible and easy to manage.

Most bids, however, are lost because the business behind them was not commercially aligned, rather than because the proposal was poorly written. The document can only ever be as coherent as the business that wrote it, and a panel reading it is, in effect, reading the business.

This is why late-stage heroics disappoint. A bid team asked to pull the story together in the final fortnight is being asked to do the executive team’s alignment work without the authority to make the trade-offs alignment requires. It can reconcile language, but it cannot decide whether the business will accept lower year-one margin, commit a named delivery lead or concede decision rights, and when those decisions are not made, the document simply records the indecision.

Better writing can polish an argument, but it cannot manufacture one.

Why the stakes are rising in travel and travel insurance

Distribution partnerships are consolidating around fewer, larger agreements, and embedded and white-label arrangements now reach further into both operating models, from booking flows to claims experience. Switching costs on both sides mean an incumbent displaced today may wait five to seven years for another chance, which turns a single process into a strategic event for the bidder and a long commitment for the buyer.

Procurement has professionalised at the same time. Evaluation panels now blend commercial, technical, legal and operational scrutiny and compare responses across bidders line by line. When the prize is larger and the scrutiny sharper, the cost of an unaligned bid compounds, and so does the return on getting the pre-work right.

What evaluation panels are really assessing in an enterprise RFP

Buyers are purchasing certainty

Buyers running enterprise processes in this sector are trying to reduce the risk of a long, expensive and highly visible decision. They want confidence that the commercial model is sound, the governance credible, the implementation path realistic and the partnership able to function under pressure and beyond contract signature. That is why governance, executive narrative and delivery architecture matter as much as product or price, because a travel brand’s customers and a loyalty program’s members experience the insurance partner’s performance directly.

Evaluation panels read hundreds of pages of capability claims, most of which look alike. What separates responses is whether the business behind them appears coherent, and a submission that is technically correct but commercially vague will almost always underperform one that feels structured, disciplined and operationally real.

How panels evaluate, from written round to orals

The written response is usually scored against weighted criteria by an RFP evaluation panel drawn from several functions, each member reading with their own concerns. A response that tells the commercial evaluator a growth story and the operations evaluator a cautious one will produce scores that disagree, and that disagreement is itself a signal.

Clarification questions then probe the gaps between sections, such as how a pricing assumption squares with a volume ambition. Reference conversations test whether existing partners recognise the partnership the document describes, and orals bring the people into the room. A misaligned business can survive a written round, but it rarely survives the room, because the room asks the questions the document was drafted to avoid.

How travel brands can design an RFP that surfaces coherence

Travel brands running a travel insurance partnership tender can make this testing deliberate. An RFP that asks for capability statements and a price tends to reward the best-written document, whereas one that asks each bidder to explain on a single page why the partnership creates value, and how its pricing reflects that view, reveals which bidder has done the alignment work.

Buyers can also require the implementation lead to present the delivery plan in orals, put unscripted questions to more than one executive, and ask references how governance worked in the second year. Allowing enough time between release and submission matters too, because a compressed timetable favours the most practised bid team over the most coherent business.

Where tender responses weaken inside the bidding business

Incoherence in a bid rarely comes from anyone making a mistake. It usually starts with the way the business organises itself to respond, with each function acting sensibly on its own terms and nobody owning the whole.

Fragmentation between executive intent and bid construction

The common failure pattern is misalignment between executive intent and bid construction. Leadership talks about growth, partnership value and customer relevance, while pricing works separately to protect margin assumptions nobody has tested against the deal thesis. Operations prepare delivery assumptions in isolation, and the proposal team, left to reconcile the pieces, defaults to features.

The result looks complete but feels fragmented. A growth story arrives priced defensively, a partnership narrative is paired with transactional governance, an implementation plan quietly contradicts the executive summary, and a risk section catalogues risks the commercial model pretends not to carry. Buyers detect this quickly, because incoherence is exactly what their process is designed to surface.

The bid no-bid decision most businesses skip

A quieter failure is bidding without a decision to win. Businesses enter processes to stay on panels, to signal presence, or because declining feels dangerous, then resource the bid accordingly and price it defensively. Sophisticated buyers can distinguish a bid from a commitment, and they discount the former.

A disciplined bid no-bid decision puts a few hard questions to the executive team before resources are committed. Does the partnership fit the business’s own strategy, or is it simply available? Can the business win at a price it would be content to deliver for the full term, with the capacity and governance maturity the buyer will need in year two? Declining is a legitimate answer, and a considered decline preserves credibility for the next cycle in a way a half-committed bid cannot.

Buyers can tell a bid made to stay visible from a bid made to win, and they score each accordingly.

In practice, a partnership priced like a renewal

Consider a travel insurance business pursuing an enterprise distribution partnership it described internally as strategic. The executive team’s narrative was growth and co-investment. Pricing, working to annual margin targets, submitted terms that protected year-one economics, while operations, wary of capacity, committed to the slowest defensible implementation timeline. Each function behaved rationally, yet the assembled response read as a partnership pitch priced like a renewal and delivered like a pilot.

The panel’s clarification questions went straight to the contradictions, and the orals unravelled from there as different executives gave different answers to the same questions. The debrief noted that the buyer had chosen a competitor whose bid was ‘less polished but more believable’.

The following cycle, the same business ran the pre-work differently. A one-page commercial thesis was agreed at executive level before drafting began, pricing was built as an expression of that thesis with the margin trade-offs decided consciously, the operations lead presented the implementation plan personally in orals, and every executive described the governance model in the same terms. The document was, if anything, plainer, but the bid was coherent, and this time the polish of competing responses mattered less than the believability gap running the other way.

Illustrative composite drawn from patterns observed across the sector, not a description of any single business.

The alignment stack behind a winning RFP strategy

The strongest bids align five layers before the proposal is written, in order, because each layer shapes the one below it. The discipline lies in refusing to start drafting until all five hold.

The five layers, in order

The commercial thesis comes first, as one agreed answer to the question that matters most. Why does this partnership create value for the buyer, and why is this business credibly the partner to deliver it? For an insurer bidding for an airline or retail group, the answer might rest on attachment performance, a claims experience that protects the partner’s brand, or an integration model the partner can live with, and every section of the eventual document inherits from it.

Pricing logic comes next, constructed as an expression of the thesis that reflects where value is created, where risk sits and what behaviour the model rewards. It should never be a spreadsheet negotiated internally after the fact, and if the thesis is co-investment, the pricing should show where the bidder is investing and how the upside is shared.

Delivery architecture is the implementation path leadership actually believes, with its sequencing, resourcing, dependencies and honest risks. Buyers reward realism over ambition, because many of them have been burned by ambition before.

The governance story describes how the partnership will run, including decision rights, escalation, performance cadence and who sits across the table in year two when something goes wrong. This is where certainty is bought.

The executive narrative is the one-page account every leader in the business can tell identically, to the panel, in orals and in the corridor. Any divergence between their versions is usually the first thing a panel finds.

The tests each layer must pass

Each layer comes with a deliberately blunt test. The purpose is to expose disagreement while it can still be resolved by decision rather than disguised by wording.

Layer	The test before drafting begins
Commercial thesis	It fits on one page, and every executive has signed it, literally.
Pricing logic	The pricing team can explain the thesis, and the thesis authors can defend the pricing.
Delivery architecture	The people who will deliver it have presented it and would sign up to it as written.
Governance story	It describes a partnership you would accept if the roles were reversed.
Executive narrative	Three leaders asked separately give the same account when their answers are compared.

 

A layer that fails its test is a signal to stop and make the missing decision before drafting resumes. The commercial thesis usually fails first, because it asks executives to agree on something specific enough to be wrong.

If the executives tell different stories, the bid is already leaking credibility before the panel has turned a page.

How to prepare for an RFP before drafting starts

Alignment is mostly a matter of what happens in the first fortnight of a bid. The most effective version of it, however, begins before the RFP is even released.

Before the RFP lands

Enterprise partnerships in travel and travel insurance rarely go to market without warning, since contract terms, renewal dates and shifts in a buyer’s strategy or ownership are usually visible to anyone paying attention. That lead time is the most valuable period in the cycle, because it is the only time a bidder can learn the buyer’s priorities outside the constraints of a formal process.

The work in this period is quiet preparation. It means understanding what the buyer wants beyond the scope of the RFP, forming an early commercial thesis, agreeing acceptable pricing parameters and checking honestly whether delivery capacity will exist at contract start. For an incumbent, it also means confronting how the buyer really regards the current partnership.

The first fortnight after release

Before drafting starts, the executive team makes an explicit decision to win or to decline, and a thesis workshop produces the one-page commercial thesis. Pricing and delivery leads then build from that thesis instead of reviewing the draft against it later, under a standing rule that contradictions are resolved by decision and never by wording.

Most of this amounts to days of executive time, and its absence costs both the bid and the panel’s respect, which outlasts the process. The bid team’s role shifts as a result, from reconciling positions at the end to holding the business to the positions agreed at the start.

What each leader owns around the executive table

• The CEO owns the thesis and the decision to win, made early, signed and defended when functions ask to dilute it, because a bid without that decision is an expensive courtesy.
• The CFO owns pricing as the thesis in numbers, and if the margin posture contradicts the growth story, the panel will find it before the board does.
• The operations lead owns the delivery plan as a personal promise rather than the proposal team’s prose, and should present it in orals, because panels notice who owns implementation.
• The bid team holds the mandate to escalate contradictions, since a proposal team that papers over misalignment is doing the panel’s detection work for it.

Orals, clarifications and what happens after the award

Lodgement is only the midpoint of an enterprise process. What follows tests whether the alignment was real, and for the winner, the period after the award tests whether it lasts.

Preparing for orals and clarification rounds

Orals are where coherence is tested under pressure. The useful preparation is to rehearse unscripted questions, with each executive answering separately and the answers compared, because if the CFO and the operations lead describe implementation risk differently in rehearsal, they will do so in the room.

Panels want to meet the people who will run the partnership, and they read the presence of the delivery lead as evidence that the bid is real. Clarification responses need the same discipline, and where a best and final offer round follows, the thesis should govern what moves, so that late concessions strengthen the story instead of contradicting it.

The pre-submission test

Before lodgement, the executive team should work through the questions set out at the end of this analysis with the same rigour it expects from the panel. Agreement in a meeting room is easy to manufacture, and a business that finds a gap before lodgement still has time to make the missing decision.

After the award, delivering the governance story

Winning begins the period in which every promise in the response is tested. The governance story becomes the operating rhythm of the partnership, and the buyer will hold the winner to it, often using the bid document as the reference point when the first difficult quarter arrives.

This is where aligned bids repay the effort a second time. When the delivery plan was built by the people who now deliver it, mobilisation starts from commitments they already own, and year-two conversations stay focused on performance. Bids assembled without alignment move the problem from the panel to the partnership, where it is more expensive to fix and more visible to the buyer’s customers.

Implications

For travel insurers and other bidders

• Treat the bid no-bid decision as an executive decision to win or to decline, and resource the bids you make as commitments.
• Agree a one-page commercial thesis before drafting begins, and require pricing, delivery and governance to inherit from it.
• Put the people who will deliver the partnership in front of the panel, and rehearse unscripted questions with leaders answering separately.
• Start the work before the RFP lands, so the response period refines a position rather than inventing one.

For travel brands running the process

• Design the RFP to test coherence as well as capability, including a one-page statement from each bidder on why the partnership creates value.
• Require the implementation lead to present in orals, put unscripted questions to more than one executive, and ask references how governance worked in the second year.
• Allow enough time between release and submission for genuine pre-work, so the process rewards the most coherent business over the most practised bid team.
• Hold the selected partner to the governance, people and implementation plan it proposed, and treat any substitution as a material change.

For boards and executive teams

• Before approving a significant bid, ask whether there is an explicit decision to win and a signed commercial thesis behind it.
• Weigh bid resourcing against the reality that a displaced incumbent may wait five to seven years for another chance.
• Treat a lost enterprise process as a test of internal alignment as well as a commercial outcome, and use the debrief to examine both.

Questions for the leadership table

• Have we made an explicit decision to win this process, or are we bidding to stay on the panel?
• Can every executive involved state the value story in one paragraph, and is it the same paragraph?
• Does our pricing express the commercial thesis, or does it contradict it?
• Would our own operations team sign up to the delivery plan exactly as it is written?
• Does the governance section describe a partnership we would actually run, or one we think the buyer wants to read?
• If the panel asked any of our leaders an unscripted question, would the answer match the document?

How Hartmann Advisory helps

Hartmann Advisory works with travel insurers and travel brands on enterprise RFP strategy, from the bid no-bid decision and commercial thesis through pricing, governance and orals preparation, and with buyers on designing the selection process itself.

Hartmann Advisory is a specialist, senior and founder-led advisory firm for travel brands and travel insurers across Australia, New Zealand and international markets. Every engagement is led by the founder from diagnosis to delivery, scoped against a measurable result and built to be delivered rather than filed.

We work across four practices.

• Commercial strategy and growth, clarifying where to play, how to win and what has to change to lift performance.
• Partnership and distribution performance, strengthening the economics, structures and governance behind partnerships.
• Market representation and expansion, leading entry and growth in new markets, including in-market representation of client brands.
• Transformation and operating model, aligning strategy, structure and accountability so that execution keeps pace with ambition.

Hartmann Advisory is led by Matt Endycott, who brings 25 years leading travel and insurance distribution as Head of Travel at Allianz Partners, Head of Distribution at nib Travel and Head of Partnerships at Europ Assistance, now Redion. Earlier roles include Virgin Australia and The Travel Corporation. His work spans airlines, retail groups, wholesalers, loyalty programs, insurers and financial institutions across Australia, New Zealand, North America, the UK and Europe.

In an enterprise RFP, the panel is scoring the business the document reveals.

Start a conversation

If you are preparing an enterprise RFP response or running a partnership tender and want sharper alignment before going to market, we would welcome a conversation.

Matt Endycott

Founder and Managing Director

matt@hartmannadvisory.com.au

+61 467 412 917

hartmannadvisory.com.au

Sources and notes

Illustrative examples in this analysis are composites drawn from patterns observed across the sector and do not describe any single business. This analysis represents the views of Hartmann Advisory and is provided for general information. It is not commercial, legal or financial advice.