Corporate Travel RFPs: What to Ask About AI Providers After the BigBear.ai Case

Before you embed AI into mission-critical corporate travel systems, ask the questions BigBear.ai’s reset made painfully clear

Corporate travel buyers face a high-stakes choice in 2026: integrate AI that streamlines bookings, policy enforcement, and traveler safety — or expose programs to vendor financial stress, compliance lapses, and service outages. Recent moves by companies such as BigBear.ai — debt elimination paired with a FedRAMP platform acquisition but falling revenue and government risk — illustrate that a single datapoint (FedRAMP status or debt reduction) is not enough.

Executive summary — the most important checks up front

If you only do three things in your RFP vetting in 2026:

1. Demand transparent, third-party-verified financials and key ratios (cash runway, recurring revenue, debt covenants).
2. Require FedRAMP evidence (ATO type, baseline level, 3PAO reports, continuous monitoring plan) and supplier responsibility boundaries.
3. Embed contractual continuity and insolvency protections: escrow, performance SLAs, termination-for-convenience with migration support, and audit rights.

Why the BigBear.ai example matters for corporate travel buyers

In late 2025 and early 2026 the market saw AI vendors reshuffle balance sheets and seek government work via FedRAMP-approved offerings. BigBear.ai’s pivot shows both opportunity and risk: removing debt and acquiring a FedRAMP platform can accelerate sales into government channels, but if revenue trends are negative or customer concentration is high, service continuity risks grow.

For travel buyers, the lesson is simple: FedRAMP alone is not a warranty of vendor stability. You must pair compliance checks with financial due diligence and contract design that mitigates bankruptcy, takeover, or supply-chain failure. To bring procurement and engineering onto the same page, reference modern developer productivity and cost signals when sizing the implementation effort and monitoring post-award obligations.

2026 trends that change RFP language and vendor scoring

• FedRAMP proliferation: More commercial vendors obtained FedRAMP status in 2024–2025; agencies and enterprise buyers now expect FedRAMP evidence for sensitive data handling.
• AI supply-chain scrutiny: Regulators and investors prioritized software bills of materials (SBOMs), third-party component transparency, and dependency mapping after high-profile incidents in 2025 — include an SBOM request in your RFP and map it to controls in your risk register (see guidance on indexing and SBOM publishing practices).
• Consolidation and M&A: Venture-funded AI vendors are increasingly targets for acquisition; change-of-control clauses matter more.
• Financial tightening: Post-2024 market corrections left many AI vendors dependent on cash runway, earned revenue, or near-term financings — raising contract and continuity risk.

Checklist: Financial health & revenue stability (what to demand in an RFP)

Ask for verifiable documents, not marketing slides.

Required financial disclosures

• Audited financial statements for the last 3 fiscal years and latest unaudited interim statements.
• Monthly cash-flow statements and a management-prepared 12–18 month cash runway analysis.
• Breakdown of revenue by customer (top 10 customers as % of revenue), by segment (government vs commercial), and by contract type (recurring SaaS vs one-time).
• Debt schedule: lenders, covenants, maturity dates, interest rates, and any recent covenant waivers.
• Details on existing credit facilities, outstanding convertible notes, and outstanding warrants or options that could dilute ownership.
• Recent funding events and committed capital (including investor rights that could affect company control).

Metrics and red-flag thresholds (use in scoring)

• Cash runway: Score higher if >18 months; treat <6 months as a major red flag.
• Revenue growth: Prefer steady or accelerating ARR; declining top-line >10% YoY requires mitigation plans.
• Customer concentration: If top-3 customers >40% of revenue, require transition planning and escrow for critical IP/data.
• Recurring revenue: Favor vendors with >60% ARR to minimize churn risk.

Checklist: Compliance & FedRAMP (what to demand and how to verify)

FedRAMP matters for government data and is increasingly relevant for enterprise buyers expecting higher security standards.

FedRAMP evidence to request

• FedRAMP Marketplace listing with the authorization type: JAB authorization vs Agency ATO.
• Authorization baseline: Low, Moderate, or High — ensure the baseline matches the sensitivity of traveler and PII data you will store/process.
• ATO date and expiration, if any, plus continuous monitoring (CONMON) evidence and recent 3PAO assessment reports.
• Copies of the vendor’s System Security Plan (SSP), Plan of Action & Milestones (POA&M), and Incident Response Plan.
• Clear mapping of responsibilities between vendor and cloud provider (e.g., AWS GovCloud, Azure Government, or Google Cloud Gov) for shared security controls.
• Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) and third-party component inventory with vulnerability management processes.

Verification steps (practical)

1. Cross-check the Marketplace entry and 3PAO reports on the FedRAMP website.
2. Ask for a redacted SSP and validate key control implementations against NIST SP 800-53 controls relevant to your data classification.
3. Request a recent penetration test and remediation snapshot covering critical CVEs and open POA&M items — relate findings to vendor incident handling and patch SLAs; see security takeaways on data integrity and auditing for examples of how third-party findings can shape procurement questions.
4. Require annual SOC 2 Type II reports or equivalent in addition to FedRAMP artifacts if you operate in the commercial space.

Contractual protections: clauses every travel RFP must include in 2026

Good contracts transfer risk; weak ones bury you in migration costs and outages.

Must-have contract clauses (sample language themes)

• Service continuity and transition assistance: Vendor must provide 12 months of transition assistance at pre-defined rates if service is terminated for insolvency or change of control.
• Escrow of source code & data: Place critical code, configuration, and decryption keys in third-party escrow with automatic release triggers (bankruptcy, insolvency, failure to meet SLAs for X days).
• Financial covenant & reporting: Require quarterly financial statements and an immediate notification obligation if cash runway falls below X months or if there is an event of default under credit agreements.
• Termination for material adverse change: Define MAE to include sudden loss of FedRAMP ATO, initiation of insolvency proceedings, or 30% decline in ARR in a rolling 12-month period.
• Change-of-control protections: Restrict assignment without your consent and provide termination rights on acquisition by parties who pose a security or compliance risk.
• Performance SLAs & credits: Specific uptime targets, incident MTTR, and financial credits or termination rights tied to missed SLAs.
• Audit & on-site inspection rights: Allow periodic compliance audits, including access to SSP artifacts and 3PAO results under NDA.

Bankruptcy-specific language to include

• Automatic rights to retrieve traveler data in standard portable formats within 7 business days of notice.
• Pre-negotiated migration playbook and vendor-paid assistance for data export and integration with a replacement vendor — mirror the migration playbook described in our case studies on zero-downtime migrations.
• Escrow release conditions that operate notwithstanding bankruptcy stay (work with counsel to craft enforceable triggers).

Operational and supply-chain checks (beyond FedRAMP)

AI stacks depend on many components. Vet the whole supply chain.

• Request SBOM and third-party dependency mapping for models, inference engines, and data stores — publishing practices are evolving; see manuals on indexing and component inventories.
• Require proof of vendor’s vendor due diligence: how they vet cloud providers, model providers, and data processors. For programs using nearshore or third-party teams, read guidance on how to pilot those arrangements without adding tech debt: how to pilot an AI-powered nearshore team.
• Ask about model provenance and retraining cadence (critical for policy changes and safety updates in travel operations) — align model-change SLAs with audited retraining logs and CI/CD pipelines (CI/CD and governance for LLM-built tools).
• Request redundancy plans — multi-region deployment, cross-cloud portability, and failover testing results. Architecture and failover design should be part of your technical evaluation; see design patterns for resilient architectures.
• Confirm patching and vulnerability management SLAs tied to CVE severities; include notification windows for critical vulnerabilities.

Practical RFP questions you can paste into your doc

Paste-ready RFP language speeds procurement and reduces ambiguity. Use these as direct submissions to vendors.

Financial & corporate stability

1. Provide audited financial statements for FY2021–FY2023 and interim statements for the current fiscal year. Include cash balance, burn rate, and forecasted runway assuming current growth rates.
2. List all debt instruments, lenders, significant leases, off-balance-sheet obligations, and any covenant waivers or defaults in the last 24 months.
3. Disclose top-10 customers, revenue concentration, and any customer contracts with early termination penalties.

FedRAMP & security

1. Provide FedRAMP Marketplace entry and state whether authorization is JAB or Agency ATO. Include 3PAO reports and date of last assessment.
2. Provide a redacted SSP, your POA&M, and evidence of continuous monitoring with the last 12 months of CONMON evidence.
3. List subcontractors involved in storage, processing, or model hosting and provide SOC 2 Type II reports where applicable — beware opaque subcontractor lists; incidents around third-party domain and reselling scams highlight the risk of undisclosed intermediaries (inside domain reselling scams).

Service continuity

1. Describe your disaster recovery plan, RTO and RPO targets for core services, and results of the most recent failover test.
2. Confirm willingness to escrow source code, configuration, and keys; provide escrow agent details and release triggers. For marketplace-style offerings, escrow and portability are common themes — see future-proofing deal marketplaces for escrow playbook examples.
3. Detail transition assistance pricing and timeline in the event of termination for insolvency or change of control.

Scoring rubric: how to quantify vendor risk in procurement evaluations

Turn qualitative answers into quantitative scores.

• Financial health (0–30): cash runway (0–10), revenue trend (0–10), customer concentration (0–10).
• Compliance & security (0–30): FedRAMP baseline & recency (0–10), SOC2/3PAO evidence (0–10), supply-chain transparency (0–10).
• Contract & continuity (0–20): escrow willingness (0–5), migration assistance (0–5), bankruptcy triggers & notice obligations (0–5), SLAs & credits (0–5).
• Operational readiness (0–20): DR tests & RTO/RPO metrics (0–10), multi-region redundancy (0–5), patching & incident response (0–5).

Set a pass threshold (for example >=70%) and categorize vendors into Approved, Conditional (needs improvements), or Denied.

Red flags that should trigger legal and C-suite attention

• No audited financials or refusal to provide key financial schedules.
• FedRAMP listing absent or expired, or 3PAO report with major unremediated findings.
• High customer concentration without mitigation plans or transition escrow.
• Unwillingness to accept escrow or provide migration assistance on insolvency events.
• Opaque subcontractor lists or refusal to provide SOC 2/3PAO evidence for key partners — see security takeaways for how audit gaps can surface risk in vendor ecosystems (security takeaways for adtech).

Post-award governance: ongoing monitoring playbook

Winning an RFP is step one — monitoring is where programs survive market shocks.

1. Quarterly financial check-ins with covenant monitoring and automatic remediation triggers.
2. Semi-annual security reviews: updated SSP, new 3PAO evidence, fresh penetration tests.
3. Annual failover and migration rehearsal with both vendor and a nominated alternate provider — architecture and resilient designs are covered in our resilience playbook.
4. Monthly operational dashboards: uptime, incident MTTR, and SLA credits applied — instrument these metrics using modern observability techniques (observability and ETL patterns).
5. Immediate notification requirements for any material events (FedRAMP revocation, debt default, or change-of-control negotiations).

"FedRAMP is necessary but not sufficient — combine compliance evidence with financial and contractual protections to secure mission-critical travel services."

Case study—how to apply the checklist: a 2026 procurement vignette

Imagine a mid-sized corporate travel program issuing an RFP in January 2026. Two finalists: Vendor A with a FedRAMP Moderate ATO and fast-growing ARR but only 8 months of runway; Vendor B with stable ARR, 24 months runway, but Agency ATO tied to a single government client.

Applying the checklist: Vendor A scores higher on technical features but fails the financial runway threshold — you negotiate a contract that requires immediate escrow, stricter SLA credits, and a shorter renewal term tied to quarterly financial milestones. Vendor B receives a conditional approval but must expand its ATO scope and provide a stronger transition playbook for commercial use.

Outcome: you choose the vendor with lower execution risk and contractually mitigate the higher-performing but financially fragile vendor — a balanced approach that prioritizes service continuity.

Final recommendations — practical next steps

1. Update your RFP template now: include the financial, FedRAMP, and bankruptcy clauses above.
2. Insist on hard deliverables (audited statements, FedRAMP artifacts, SSC 2 reports) and verify via third-party services (D&B, credit agencies, 3PAOs).
3. Use the scoring rubric to make decisions transparent and defensible to procurement and legal stakeholders.
4. Post-award: operationalize quarterly financial monitoring and annual failover rehearsals — incorporate configuration and failover tests used by high-availability platforms (see high-throughput API and failover patterns in our API reviews: CacheOps Pro).

Why this matters in 2026

AI vendor landscapes are maturing, but so too are risks. Increased FedRAMP adoption, tighter investor scrutiny, and supply-chain concerns make it essential that corporate travel buyers insist on both security and financial resilience. The BigBear.ai example shows the complexity: a debt-free balance sheet or FedRAMP stamp is only meaningful when paired with healthy revenue, diversified customers, and contract terms that protect continuity.

Actionable takeaways

• Do not accept FedRAMP status as the sole trust signal — pair it with financial and operational verification.
• Embed escrow, explicit insolvency triggers, and transition assistance into your RFP as standard terms.
• Score vendors on finance, compliance, contract, and operations — and require remedial steps for conditional approvals.

Call to action

Need a ready-to-use RFP template and vendor scoring workbook tailored for corporate travel AI vendors? Download our 2026 Corporate Travel AI Vendor RFP Checklist and Contract Addendum or contact bot.flights Procurement Advisory for a 30-minute vendor risk review tailored to your program. If you're operationalizing monitoring, consider modern observability and CI/CD practices to keep vendor changes visible (observability, CI/CD for LLMs).

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