Unless you're in the hospitality trade or maybe the mini golf or roller coaster design business, Orlando is not likely to be one of your travellers' top destinations. But as our awareness increases of how the lines are blurring between our leisure lives and our business lives, and how what happens in the leisure travel industry inevitably wanders to the business travel sector, it might be a good idea to look at what's happening at the home of Walt Disney World.
You see, those of our readers who have been to Orlando recently may have experienced the future for business travellers.
Visitors to Walt Disney World can now be issued with a wristband — a "MagicBand" in Disney-ese. That wristband lets you open your Disney Resort hotel door, have access to any theme and water parks for which you are entitled, go through FastPass entrances and charge any refreshments or merchandise purchased at the park to the Disney Resort hotel room account.
The MagicBand uses RF - Radio Frequency technology– the same technology is used in credit cards, keyless car entry and fitness wristbands. It also uses personalisation and targets offers accordingly.
In a manner similar to airport biometrics, Disney's technology can speed visitors from airport to transient accommodation to destination and link any of their spending on extras to one account, the equivalent of a company corporate card. And like the process of using a smartphone to make digital payments, any incidental spend on an account linked to that wristband can be coded to an appropriate spend category.
We doubt that buyers will have to start deciding whether their travellers should don a pink or a turquoise wristband but what's happening in the consumer world reminds us that technology can help our travellers by accelerating passage through some barriers and help the company by providing consolidated data but, at the same time, it's making it very easy to segregate and personalise offerings to corporate travellers.
Rather than expending effort on worrying about how suppliers can now target individual travellers, the time is no doubt here to consider whether this potential to individualise policy and offers as well as easing passage can deliver real benefits. Travellers may all work for the same company but their trips and the business objectives of those trips are all different. Technology means that managers will in the future be able to deliver solutions that meet the needs of different travellers — and the one company.