Between US carriers thinking a Trump administration means it was time to rethink open skies and the Trump administration thinking it was time to close the borders, it was hard last week not to contemplate the short-term effects on air travel.
But there were also a few small stories that were saying a lot about where the travel management process is going.
Concur has now incorporated a chatbot into its expense management tool. Chatbots are talked about regularly in the leisure travel business but business travel has been slow to adopt this child of the happy marriage between AI and automation. This is probably because the general perception is that what can be automated in business travel management is already highly adopted and when questions arise, a specialist with knowledge of the situation and the market is what is needed.
There was a whiff of change last autumn when Concur bought Hipmunk but to date Concur appears to have done nothing with the online travel company.
But a bot is now in beta test at Concur. It will ease travellers' lives as it will deal with simple questions about their itineraries, enable expenses to be submitted and receipts to be uploaded. The whole idea of bots is to deal with the frequently asked questions and thus make the user experience better — and the operating costs lower.
Blockchains, on the other hand, will have a major role in the evolution of payment systems. They can hold historical data in an encrypted and decentralised fashion. Instead of having a central authority acting as a trusted intermediary, blockchain works with any party to a transaction able to check against a virtual ledger to confirm ability to pay and to keep a record of that transaction.
This week the technology became part of the establishment when American Express joined the Hyperledger project which is an open source collaborative effort created to advance cross-industry blockchain technologies.
The payments industry is built on trust, trust that the mechanism you use will deliver the funds you expect. Blockchain does this for new payment mechanisms — or old ones in new markets — by using a decentralised ledger system. It gives a set of guarantees and trust, something absolutely essential in travel where many buyers and endpoint users are often one-time users and unknown to suppliers.
Digital payments demonstrate their real value in business with — and travel to — so-called emerging markets. This week Finnair announced that it was trialling Alipay, a Chinese digital payment platform used by almost half a billion people, for inflight purchases on its Shanghai-Helsinki service and in the non-Schengen part of its lounge at Helsinki Airport. One route may sound a very small marketplace. But the Asian travel market is huge.
And, as traditional markets put up walls and practise protectionism in one form or another, our businesses will turn increasingly to new markets and tomorrow's process solutions.