With hygiene and traveller safety widely expected to be at the forefront during the corporate travel industry's recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic, tech-forward approaches to achieving those principles emerged as a key theme in a recent travel industry hackathon.
Conducted in June by non-profit travel association Travelscrum, which was formed earlier this year to help the industry navigate the fallout from the Covid-19 outbreak, the hackathon competition tasked entrants with developing solutions to address one or more of three issues currently facing the sector: hygiene and health; travel and experiences; and sustainability and relief.
The top prize was awarded to a team from custom corporate travel app developer Roadmap. Going by the name 'Roadhack', the team developed a two-pronged solution designed for use by corporate travel managers and travellers to ensure travel is being conducted safely and within company policy.
The tool features a travel policy platform that managers can use to configure elements of an organisation's travel policy, including approved destination countries and ground transport and dining polices, as well as to access airline cleanliness procedures sourced from ATPCO Routehappy's new Reassurance Universal Product Attributes (UPAs).
Meanwhile, a companion app enables corporate travellers to access key information on Covid-related risks and security protocols for particular destinations, along with tips for wellbeing and lists of trusted suppliers. The app enables managers to check in with travellers during a trip to ask if they're feeling confident and safe and to address any concerns.
"What we understood is that there's a need for a lot of information before a traveller books their trip," says Micha van Eijk, customer onboarding and product owner for Roadmap and a member of the Roadhack developer team.
"Generic travel information can be found in many places but it's difficult to find specific information tailored to the needs of the business travel industry. That is why we designed two interfaces in our solution that exactly fit the need of both the business traveller and the travel manager."
With the hackathon grand prize in hand, Roadmap is exploring next steps for implementing the Roadhack solution into its offerings.
"We are keen to determine what is viable for our business and adapt it to our own product," says van Eijk.
"We have never ventured into the pre-travel, or even pre-booking, space before. It would require extensive qualitative research with travellers and travel teams to figure out how to incorporate this into our current product set. Basically, we are going to ask the opinion of our customers, prospects and base of business travellers."
Other hackathon winners included a team from price assurance specialist Smart Hotel Rate, which won the EMEA regional award for Clean Hotel, an API-based service that collects hotel property cleanliness and hygiene data from third-party providers.
Clean Hotel furnishes travellers with that information via SMS bot upon arrival, providing the date and time their room was last cleaned and giving them the option to request further data on cleaning for other areas of the hotel, such as public spaces, elevators and restrooms.
ATPCO's all-female developer team won the Americas prize for creating a tool that matches traveller preferences to destinations factoring in health and hygiene restrictions, while the APAC award went to Voyageur, a software system designed for hotels, airports and other public areas that automatically detects whether people are following social distancing and mask protocols from CCTV footage and alerts relevant personnel.
Overall, the hackathon drew nearly 50 entrants, according to Katie Virtue, consultant for Travelscrum member Festive Road, who was on the hackathon's operations team.
Among the entrants, several key trends and themes emerged related to how technology can help the travel industry bounce back from the pandemic, Virtue says.
Prominent among those themes was "the development of micro services relying on new data points to bring more transparency and instil confidence," Virtue says, citing the hotel cleaning notification app as an example of such services.
Developers also were hard at work on building out better data capabilities, offering "real-time, relevant, contextual data on Covid-19 as well as the environmental situation, implementable at point of sale and on-trip via mobile, to help travellers make informed decisions and get by once they reach their destination," Virtue noted.
The implementation of touchless technology at hotels and airports emerged as a third theme, with touchless being applied for a range of hygiene-related use-cases, according to Festive Road consultant Aurélie Krau, who served as EMEA region manager for the hackathon.
"It goes from virtual queuing systems to enhanced digital and mobile payment systems, digital passport solutions, virtual check-in and check-out systems and virtual concierge services," says Krau.
With hackathon entrants delivering an array of promising solutions, the next step is to bring them to the market.
"The next conversation is now how to make such solutions available. A number of travel managers… indicated their interest in seeing these new developments, because the business travel sector is historically always behind the consumer experience," says Krau. "They want to see what new solutions could benefit their programmes and enhance the traveller experience."