According to GBTA forecasts, global spend on business travel is expected to reach US$1.7 trillion by 2022. That's a whole lot of travellers getting on planes, checking into hotels and whizzing around in rental cars.
This increased mobility may be good for business, but it also presents a challenge for travel managers: how do you keep everyone happy, healthy and safe whilst managing costs and still have time left for other tasks?
Luckily, we're at an interesting time in our industry where emerging technologies are helping us work smarter and gain greater levels of insight about travel than ever before.
These insights are helping companies streamline planning processes and save millions of dollars. TMCs regularly talk to their customers about how they can help them get the most out of the technologies available to them — both the big global names and the smaller companies that are doing great things in their own right.
In return there are three big questions that all travel managers should be asking their TMCs:
1 How can I identify the new technologies that I need to deliver value for my business and ensure that I don't just buy into hype?
2 I'm sitting on a lot of data — how do I analyse it and use it to make better decisions?
3 How do I provide my travellers with a great experience within our corporate travel policy?
Here's some help with how to go about answering these questions:
Distinguish between can, can't and could
The graveyard of technology is full of products that have failed spectacularly. Many of them were built around a sound principle; they simply lacked the right application.
In an industry that is already working well to manage complexities, travel managers can avoid making the same mistake by ensuring they understand what technologies can and can't do and avoid speculating about what they could do.
For example, blockchain may have the potential to speed up processing times for invoicing, payments and contract negotiations, but its use among closed supplier groups is unlikely to benefit many travel managers — yet.
The ability to make distinctions between can, can't and could, is vital in making sure investments are aligned with technologies that can be applied to and enhance a current travel programme now.
TMCs can and should be providing advice about these topics to travel managers; it is also important to keep up to date with current trends as the speed of disruption continues to reduce product lifecycles.
Make sure your technology is working for you
Advances in AI are helping travel managers deliver more relevant, personalised insights in real-time and on user-friendly dashboards. Yet many businesses are only just starting to realise and explore its full potential.
This is the rationale behind the recently launched IBM Travel Manager which makes use of the massive volume of shopping and booking data contained in our systems.
This data is used to create real-time predictive analytics and make recommendations about how adjustments in travel booking behaviour patterns can positively impact a company's travel budget. These actionable insights would normally involve hours of manual work trawling through third-party reports and balance sheets but now travel management companies and corporates will be able to make important real-world decisions quicker, and with more confidence.
Other decisions made easier by an AI-powered platform include the ability to build a complete picture of where non-compliant spend is happening and take steps to reduce it.
Put people at the heart of travel programmes
The goal of technology is to help travel managers unlock hidden opportunities to better track, manage, predict, and analyse travel costs; and enhance the overall experience for travellers.
With the growth of 'bleisure' and more travellers combining business and leisure in single trips with already complex itineraries, the challenges travel managers now face in building tailored itineraries is growing.
Our research shows more than two-thirds (68%) of business travellers book over half of their trips using non-approved consumer channels whilst 94% of hotel sales turnover is lost by travel management companies to other booking platforms.
In order to ensure travellers stay within the approved systems and policies of their companies, it's important for TMCs to provide access to the broadest range of content. The best way to do this is to ensure their GDS partner has relationships and negotiated rates with both big and boutique hotels, close to the office and in the centre of town, so travellers can always find what they want, where you want them to book, so they aren't lost from the system altogether.
That said, it's important to remember that even with all this technology, it is people and not data that are at the heart of every corporate travel programme.