A new report from Barclaycard and Festive Road suggests that despite procurement and controls having been central to corporate travel management for more than a decade, that this is all about to change.
Evolving travel management ecosystems argues that changes in demand, distribution and data are causing a shift in focus in travel management and that the changes are being fuelled by the speed of change in technology and exacerbated by the mobile revolution.
Demand is changing both in terms of the destinations which businesses must visit and in the demographics, needs and wants of the travellers. This is causing change in both what suppliers are offering the corporate travel market and who those suppliers are.
This has caused massive change in distribution. Paul Tilstone, the report's author, says, "We are entering a new era where managing access to the vast majority of content is increasingly challenging."
There are also more challenges because of the quantity of relevant data now available and the increase in channels for communication and booking. For example, having a policy for managing mobile is now considered vital.
The report finds that there are two main kinds of approach to travel management: corporate-focused travel management (what the author calls the "commanding approach") or person-centric travel management or a "liberating approach".
It concludes that all this change will also inevitably mean a dilution in the stronghold of traditional procurement in travel management and consequently less reliance on the process and more strategic thought.
There is a lot to digest in this new report about how travel management is changing but without doubt there is an overall trend is for a more person-centric approach. It is not just that the new generation of business traveller has different behaviour and expectations.
As HRG's Matthew Pancaldi recognised in a recent Business Travel iQ Expert contribution, advances in data management and technology mean that specific business units and travellers' needs and wants can be catered for individually while the overall corporate objective is still met.
For a generation central control has been viewed as the only feasible structure for a successful travel programme. Some global programmes might have had different TMCs in different regions or different local service delivery but virtually all 'successful' travel policies would have had an umbrella company policy which allowed for local variations.
The thinking behind this was logical and straightforward. The role of travel was to underpin corporate strategy and that meant controlling cost through a policy that steered travellers to agreed processes of booking, payment and reconciliation and the use of preferred partners as the best way to extract maximum value.
The needs of an organisation's travellers may always have been diverse but developments in data and technology mean that the approach to travel no longer needs to be crudely uniform across a company and focused only on unit cost. It can recognise that what works for sales and marketing may be different from that for admin departments such as HR.
The time may have come when companies recognise that business travel is not just a cost to be lowered but a vital component of their strategy for growth.