When evaluating the tools you use to manage your business travel, it's easy to get bogged down in the technical capabilities of particular platforms and forget about why you're using advanced technology in the first place — to enhance your travel booking experience, as well as make your travel programme more consolidated and cost-effective.
Advances in technology bring greater choice and flexibility to bookings. For instance, the new tangible benefits of NDC are starting to filter through, such as the ability to reserve seats and add ancillary extras to a booking, within the same platform. That's, of course, all in addition to the direct cost benefits.
Meanwhile, chatbots and AI assistants are now making it quicker and easier for bookers to access good customer service online, with or without a fully-managed service agreement.
The right technology isn't just giving you more power, control and oversight over your travel management. It's also offering travellers the opportunity to love their travel and booking experience. With more options and greater accessibility than ever before, the criteria for finding technology that is right for you and your travellers is ever-expanding.
So you see this new technology is about more than just appealing to the head; it's about appealing to the heart. For me, there are three key areas that booking platforms need to address to appeal to both:
Smarter reporting
Being able to slice and dice data by traveller, team and department is crucial for organisations to be able to understand costs. Platforms that offer detailed reporting on every aspect of the booking process empower organisations to make incredibly astute travel decisions. Smarter data means smarter outcomes.
A powerful platform consolidates every element of a booking in one place meaning there are fewer invoices to handle and a reduction in expense claims to manage. That frees up time to work on other matters and means that corporate travel billing isn't weighing down your business.
Information consolidation also means you can harness the power of big data, for a more comprehensive view. If the content aggregation technology behind a booking platform wasn't in place, it would be impossible to delve into the data for thorough analysis. You would need to manually input bookings made on alternative platforms, which depending on the size of your organisation, could well be an impossible task.
The removal of this administrative burden and the ability to harness more data, in conjunction with a skilled TMC, enables you to more easily identify areas for savings, and improve overall efficiency.
Here you see how technology can ensure the procurement and finance teams can enjoy business travel management, but this only works when your travellers are all using the tools you give them. And to do that, you need to ensure they love the tools they're given.
A better booking experience
Your booking tool needs to offer more than the best connections and in-depth reporting. If your team don't like using it, your travel expenditure is going to be impossible to control and manage.
Unappealing booking platforms drive users to explore alternative tools, where they are confident their experience will be quicker or easier or where they think they'll find the best rates. However, if your team are having to use a variety of disparate tools to satisfy their travel requirements, it's going to make the booking process take longer, impacting on their productivity.
Great booking platforms provide a slick, dependable experience that individual supplier sites simply can't match. They are developed specifically to be easy to use, and supported by advanced technology, making the whole process more simple and straightforward. Busy business travellers shouldn't be expected to learn the quirks of every supplier's booking process and documentation.
Just like the content aggregation sites they use in their personal lives, business travellers demand a simple booking experience, no matter how they travel, with extras like breakfast, wifi and seat reservations, communicated clearly and consistently across suppliers. A booking tool that provides this from the offset will inevitably lead to greater trust and loyalty to a single tool, helping to consolidate your travel programme and reduce leakage.
That means all data is truly captured in one place and is easily accessible to procurement teams. Plus travellers out on the road can quickly access and configure their bookings as required. In short, they get a consistently reliable experience — something they won't get from conventional consumer-focused booking tools.
Right for the individual
So, your travellers are starting to love their business travel booking experience because it's reliable and they're in control. That's a good start, but there's another challenge that gets in the way of them truly loving the process — and that's centred around the question of travel policy.
One travel policy rarely fits all. Different travellers in an organisation require flexibility by department team or job role. Booking platforms must cater to this whilst guiding staff towards options that are traveller and budget-friendly.
Self-booking platforms where the travel policy is 'baked in' with clear prompts can guide people down the right path, so they make better booking decisions from the outset. When travellers need to book out of policy, a straightforward approvals process should automatically get travellers' booking requests to the right place for approval.
The flexibility needed by organisations, with regards to their travel, needs to be reflected in the tools they use. Individual requirements deserve individual solutions.
As technology continues to evolve, we're committed to prioritising these key areas to ensure that the new developments we implement are aligned with them and offer real value to our customers and their travellers. Developments that don't match up to these priorities may represent advances in terms of mechanics, but they risk being either superfluous or unenjoyable for the people actually experiencing them day to day. And at the heart of your travel programme, that's what really counts.