"Ask not for whom the bell tolls," wrote John Donne in a Meditation written in 1624. In this day and age, when job after job after job is eliminated by advances in technology, we are right to ask the question in a different context and focus on "who's next?" in our industry.
In his book "Who Owns the Future" Jaron Lanier claims, though he regrets the development, that he does not mind too much if the world loses most professional photographers, musicians and car makers to technology.
Yet the advances of the man with the scythe march far beyond the folk Lanier lists and moves ever further into the standard jobs of the middle class. We can buy and sell houses online; we can do wills online, we can shop online and that is now. What's happening to bank tellers and checkout clerks? Doctors and surgeons are under threat although talk to any technologist in this field and they will tell you their work is to facilitate by technology. We all know that Kodak closed down with 140,000 jobs axed and that Instagram sold for $1bn shared between 11 people.
What about the travel industry and the corporate travel arena in particular?
We can see this happening. When I was recently passing through Dulles Airport in Washington DC I was struck by the dearth of check-in agents behind the counter. The agents were standing bored waiting for the pink slips to arrive while travellers checked themselves in, dropped their luggage and made their way to the gate without much assistance.
Views of the future suggest our luggage will be collected from our homes by drones and loaded into planes by robots and that we will board the pilotless planes in pods that will load us and our hand luggage onto the plane.
Contract management, inventory management and pricing systems are increasing in their competence. Automation is taking over in the airline and hotel inventory management systems at ever increasing levels of sophistication, particularly as personal pricing expertise is embedded into these systems. Dare one ask what is the future for airline and hotel sales management teams? Seen any cutbacks lately?
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Automation has shifted jobs in airlines ©Anna Bryukhanova/iStockTechnology will take care of the mundane for us in this industry. The question, then, becomes what is it of value we have to offer? As we move forward we need to address this. The answers sit in travel managers and travel agencies maximising the assets they have neglected for far too long.
As Lanier notes, and clearly expressed in Yuval Harari's new book "A Brief History of the Future", the greatest value we have is our data. The equation, on the one hand with the traveller and on the other with the supplier, is out of balance particularly as the technology and understanding of its uses is so underutilised by the buyers. Without an effort to understand the answer to the question, "Ask not for whom the bell tolls" the answer will certainly be that it tolls for the travel manager.
The path ahead
Like it or not, these are exciting times. Answering the question of whom the bell tolls is not a lost cause, with the only answer being "us." The shifts in the way we can manage corporate travel in the future may be difficult and challenging in the transition but that is what we are all about, isn't it?
Take the status quo, then let's play a game of guess the future.
Currently corporate travel managers focus on securing the appropriate deals for their companies. These deals are based on usage, commitment to contract fulfillments and service level agreements. Technology loads the deals into the booking systems and reports back on compliance. Corporate travel managers generally rely on these reports to quantify their savings to senior management. They use the booking data to anticipate changing markets and to identify emerging savings opportunities. They use traveller feedback to measure supplier service levels. They meet up at conferences or in conference rooms and the cycle rolls around again.
In the future all this to-ing and fro-ing will be so completely unnecessary. There is an argument to say that it is so already.
Apart from the value of personal relationships and loyalty, all of this contract work is programmable and automated. Computers can calculate the value of a client, the prices they will pay, the incentives they will need and what the likelihood of their shifting suppliers is likely to be. We cannot pretend that algorithms don't know everything about us. According to Harari, Google and the likes transect more than a 1,000 points of data about us in each transaction and each transaction adds more information to the pot. This information is held by the suppliers and the buyers are mere pawns in the game. If we don't accept the shifts and changes and think about things differently, it will be game over. And the bell will toll for many.
Finding value in data will save jobs
Travel managers are still locked in the silos of the past. Collectively their data has huge value and it is completely untapped because, for some reason, we have shouted about the privacy of the data at the expense of the information that others are using to the disadvantage of the buyers. This is not to say individual data is not sacrosanct to the corporation, but others are using it to their advantage.
We are fortunate in the travel industry. We have lots of data and many points of intersection but we do not need personal information to leverage the value of what we have. We need to harness our data in sensible ways to re-balance the equation between buyers and sellers. Without doing this, and providing our own powerhouses of data, we needn't bother with the future. We will be assigned to another on Lanier's list of lost causes along with the photographers, bank tellers and the copyists of Donne's time in the 17th century.
How can we do this? How do we need to revise our thinking and our operating systems in radical ways? We welcome your thoughts and ideas to share via email or LinkedIn. Credit given of course. This is an important discussion for our industry.