Business travel often looks to the leisure industry for innovation especially as we know that travellers can be picky about their trips. Adopting personalisation and recommendation tactics are some of the latest ways that companies are changing to suit traveller needs...in a way suggesting that travellers know best.
But, and some travel managers may think this on a regular basis, recent technology developments suggest that letting travellers search and book trips themselves may have been the wrong way to go about it.
This came to mind when I spoke this week with Ned Nadima, the co-founder of a new Canada-based start-up Strabe which has developed a CRM to act, at its most basic, as a trip request and response communication platform.
Travellers simply enter their departure dates, destination and type any requests into the system; that information then goes to a TMC agent who responds with suggested trip itineraries. The agent knows the company's travel policy, negotiated rates and whether that traveller is allowed to use suppliers like Airbnb or loyalty cards — they may even have authority from the travel manager to offer out-of-policy options if cheaper.
That eliminates the need for pre-trip approval if used for budgeting purposes as the TMC agent will only send options in line with the travel programme, and the traveller can't be out of policy if using the TMC is mandated. The traveller doesn't spend hours searching for the best options either, so it saves time for everyone.
Chatbots also go back to the request concept and eliminate the search stage, just in a more relaxed, automated and techy environment.
Others are looking at email plug-ins. Microsoft's travel team has worked with Amadeus to integrate travel bookings in Outlook calendars and both have been looking at other ways to arrange travel itineraries via email which link to online booking tools and learn to process when words are spelt incorrectly.
This concept of course isn't new — travellers have always been able to phone or email a TMC to ask and book an itinerary. But Nadima believes that in its desire to mirror the leisure travel industry some in the business travel world got too into the search element despite a difference in priorities.
"Most people only have a limited number of vacation time, so it makes sense to search around and find the best deal [or hotel]…but for work it doesn't make sense to look for reviews and spend hours searching. I think that's a big blindspot on the true meaning of seamless business travel," he said.