BCD and Advito, its consulting arm, this week signed an agreement with Cisco which should increase the use of virtual collaboration, ie travel alternatives, as part of its clients' travel programmes.
The move is significant in that a travel management company is signalling that video alternatives should become a positive component of a travel programme and complement actual travel rather than being viewed as a straight substitution.
"Virtual collaboration solutions can now effectively replace travel in many circumstances," said April Bridgeman, senior vice president, BCD Travel, and managing director, Advito. "We see a new discipline emerging that uses a holistic and strategic approach to deciding which trips drive value and which meetings are best handled by virtual collaboration."
Business travel budget holders have long recognised that the most effective way of cutting travel costs is travel avoidance. What they didn't reckon on was how changing behaviour in our private lives would make the use of video alternatives not only acceptable but a natural, default choice.
FaceTime and Skype are being used more and more in everyday life. We consequently increasingly think of video calls as a standard way of communicating. And, as we see over and over again, the more that something becomes standard in our private life, the more we expect this option to be available in our business life.
So, whereas videoconferencing was once something to be scheduled for a session in a special room, our use of FaceTime and Skype have made face-to-face calls an everyday, normal occurrence. That means that it now fits very naturally into a travel programme as one of the options for communicating. Andre Smit, who leads Cisco's worldwide collaboration sales organisation, said, "Since more that 45% of communication is visual, increasing the number of times you connect face-to-face improves communication. On a quality video call, the people involved feel like they are actually together in the same room — it helps drive a relationship. This is critical for remote workers, for meetings with partners and clients, for interactions with vendors and suppliers."
BCD and Advito are saying that video meetings have become the norm — there are more options, prices have fallen, systems are easier to use and there is no need for technicians, as there once was. This means that choosing between a virtual collaboration solution and a trip is going to become integral to the booking process.
BCD is establishing a Total Collaboration Management practice. This reflects how our expectations and choices for meeting and communicating with those in other locations are expanding all the time.