As the UK business travel sector looks back at the most turbulent economic period in its history, many will be thankful that investment in technology and innovation has continued. Mark Frary looks at where the money has been spent and what we can expect in the future
One of the first casualties of economic downturn is usually research and development, meaning innovation can sometimes suffer. Yet surprisingly, given the state of the world's economies, innovation is rampant in the business travel sector.
The reason is a combination of two things. The first is the lag between investment and delivery, particularly in the world of technology, where over-promise and under-delivery are far too common. And the second is a natural desire by companies in the business travel sector to make themselves stand out from the crowd.
As recessions force companies to compete on price, innovation is exactly the sort of thing that allows one company to distinguish itself. So where is all this innovation happening? We take a whirlwind tour of the various sectors of our industry.
Innovation in the air
British Airways (BA) has just unveiled its new First-Class cabin. The airline has spent £100 million on an upgrade of its most expensive cabin with design consultancies Tangerine and Forpeople. Tangerine was the agency behind BA's Club World flat bed while Forpeople has worked on projects for Aston Martin and Jaguar.
The year 2010 should see the Boeing 787 Dreamliner finally take off commercially, following more than two years of delays. The plane has had its first test flight but the first services are likely to be towards the end of this year. The 787's innovative design includes the use of composite materials in more than half of the primary structure, including the fuselage and wings. This will make the 787 incredibly lightweight, and therefore considerably more fuel efficient than its predecessors. The aircraft is also being designed with open information systems and designers are looking at incorporating health monitoring systems that will enable it to self-diagnose in the event of mechanical problems.
Japan's All Nippon Airways (ANA) is the launch customer, although it has not yet announced the routes that the 787s will fly, it is likely that they will be confined to short-haul services, at least initially.
Another innovation this year is bmi's new short-haul service. In January, the airline pulled (or should that be rebranded) its separate Business-Class section. The airline is now offering what it calls 'Flexible Economy' fares, which give access to all of the benefits of Business Class, including lounge access and free food, but with a name that will not break any newly restrictive corporate travel policy on flying only in Economy.
Dominic Paul, bmi's managing director, says: "We have relaunched bmi's UK & Ireland product in response to customer feedback to meet their needs in a changing marketplace. Customers travelling on our higher fares value business lounges, a seat at the front of the aircraft and complimentary food and drink but most no longer have Business-Class travel policies for short-flight travel. We have created a new service that delivers these important benefits, but on an all-Economy aircraft, so they also benefit from a lower level of APD."
Announced recently, one of the most surprising innovations in the airline industry has been the concept of flat beds in Economy rather than Business Class. Air New Zealand will later this year launch the Skycouch on its Boeing 777-300 services between Los Angeles and Auckland, with its fleets on Asian, North American and UK services to be refitted by 2012.
At first glance the Skycouch looks like a row of three Economy seats but a push of a button raises a long footrest that converts the three seats into a flat 'bed'. Fares have not been set yet but the company said the price would probably be based on the cost of two and a half standard Economy seats. An Economy return in April costs £720, which translates to £1,800 for a Skycouch, just under half the cost of a Business-Class return (plus of course you could always share with a colleague on your Skycouch).
This year will also see the return of widely available wi-fi (excluding BA's all-Business services from London City) across the Atlantic. In the middle of 2010, Lufthansa plans to relaunch FlyNet - its onboard broadband internet service - and expects to equip most of its long-haul fleet within a year of the launch.
Lufthansa originally launched FlyNet in conjunction with Connexion by Boeing but had to withdraw the service after the airline manufacturer decided to close its internet arm. The new FlyNet will be powered by Panasonic's new high bandwidth exConnect service, which offers unrestricted surfing, email and file transfer, including attachments, and Virtual Private Network connections.
The airline will offer a variety of rate plans, including the ability to use Miles & More frequent-flyer points to pay for connection.
Innovation in hotels
Hotels are starting to look at other ways of using their rooms other than for staying guests. In January, Marriott opened its new GoThere Virtual Meetings studios at its New York Marriott East Side Hotel and Bethesda North Marriott Hotel and Conference Center. The studio is a room fitted out with Cisco's next-generation video-conferencing service TelePresence.
The hotel group made the decision to install the technology after a survey of corporate customers revealed that they would hold more meetings at hotels if an appealing virtual meeting option was available.
More studios are planned, including one at the Grosvenor House in London. There are already nearly 700 existing locations around the world that have TelePresence installed.
David Marriott, chief operations officer, Americas Eastern Region for Marriott International, said: "[The system] will offer our customers a new way to hold more productive, collaborative meetings linking locations around the world, and open up new revenue opportunities for our company and our hotels."
Starwood, meanwhile, is doing its bit to reduce its impact on the environment by installing charging stations for guests' electric cars at all of the hotels in its recently launched Element Hotels eco-chic chain. Starwood's Senior Vice President of Specialty-Select Brands, Brian McGuinness, says: "Even guests who don't yet drive electric cars tell us that the charging stations are encouraging them to think about more sustainable alternatives, and that's very gratifying."
Innovation in TMCs
Finding and comparing the best air fares and extras for a client is becoming increasingly more difficult with the introduction of ancillary fees by airlines.
Jan Altemeier, senior vice president of product marketing at Sabre Holdings , believes his company has a solution. "Airlines are creatively unbundling their services, such as pre-reserved seats. What we hear from agencies and travellers is that they want transparency in this area."
To cater for this, Sabre has developed Flight Fee Explorer, which allows travel consultants to enter a list of extras that the passenger wants and compare different airlines.
"We find many business travellers value getting a reserved seat, but they don't want to check a bag," says Altemeier. "It is a way to compare apples with apples."
FCm Travel Solution's latest innovation makes booking your favourite restaurant for a business lunch or client dinner even easier.
FCm Dining Solutions tool, powered by Livebookings Concierge, allows bookers to search for real-time availability at a specific restaurant, access up-to-date descriptions and images of the venue and read Harden's ratings and reviews. They can also save their favourite locations, review bookings and build customer profiles.
"FCm's strategy in the current economic climate is to add value to our client offering," says Graeme Milne, FCm Travel Solutions' head of sales UK. "Cost is still a key issue for clients at the moment, but we are not going down the route of our competitors and lowering prices. Instead we are looking at ways of adding value and service."
Sabre is also looking to introduce a tool called Contract Optimization into the EMEA region, after a successful introduction in the US a few months ago. The tool helps agencies to analyse where their corporate clients travel and how they might best optimise that according to the corporate's negotiated deals. It uses preferred supplier arrangements to ensure that they appear high up during the shopping process. A reporting element to the tool allows TMCs to monitor, on a weekly, basis how well the client is doing against his deals.
"Airlines are getting much stricter about corporate customers meeting their goals to obtain discounts in the past two years," says Michael Brophy, a spokesman for Sabre.
The company has also introduced a tool called Sabre Ticketing Assistance, which cuts back on the manual work involved in issuing tickets and, claims the company, helps reduce the number of debit memos that the agency has to raise.
"It's a very powerful way for agencies to eliminate non-value-added services," says Altemeier.
Innovation in self-booking tools
Hotelscene has recently revamped its Xtranet hotel booking tool, relaunching it as MyStay. The new tool has enhanced mapping systems, policy and profile integration and search results that are logical and intuitive. One of the key advances has been a reduction in the number of screens a user must past through to make a booking. Live room availability is displayed in price order and travel managers have control over the types of properties, including budget chains, that are displayed.
Another innovation is the new Rate Analyser from technology firm Conferma. The web-based tool analyses hotel bookings and notifies users of any favourable changes in room rate, allowing time to cancel and re-book if appropriate. Conferma says that the tool takes advantage of the increasing use of real-time 'best rate on the day' pricing strategies.
Simon Barker, Conferma's CEO, says: "Rate Analyser is a tool that will certainly meet that need by automating a traditionally manual and labour-intensive process, delivering actionable data which drives real value to clients."
The company is also working on new versions of its Hotel Booker Express and Professional tools, which will help make bookings quicker. The interface will be slicker and give even more accurate guide rates for hotels - always a challenge in time.
GetThere is innovating, too. In September, the company (part of Sabre), launched what it called Collaboration Suite, which is a collection of tools bringing together online travel booking, access to video-conferencing tools, meetings booking and management and Sabre's corporate social networking community - cubeless. In addition, the suite includes a return on invested collaboration calculator, which crunches value inputs by employees and policy controls configured by corporations to see which travel or non-travel option is most appropriate.
"Travel agents will evolve into collaboration agents," says Altmeier. "There are many ways of collaborating - travel is just one - there is also social media and telepresence."
Collaboration Suite is a response to the growing interest in demand management. At the beginning of a trip booking, the suite asks for the purpose of the trip. If it is for an internal meeting, the booker is passed to a landing page where they have to decide whether a web conference would be more appropriate than a face-to-face meeting.
The recent roll-out of Amadeus' Extreme Search tool on the Lufthansa website gives a taster of what might be in store for conference organisers. The new-look Lufthansa site lets leisure travellers specify a maximum budget for a trip and are then offered a range of flight options and dates.
"This completely overthrows the established practice on airline websites, which requires that research is done based on known destinations and specific travel dates," explains Amadeus' VP, product development, sales and e-commerce platforms, Denis Lacroix.
The company is now looking to use this feature to help plan multinational meetings. Lacroix says the tool will be able to take in the locations of people required at a meeting and then suggest a suitable venue that takes into account flight availability and price.
"Say you are a U2 fan, you could look at a website and ask it to show you cheapest options for flying to see the band - it's the same thing for a corporate booking tool," says Lacroix. "If you have an event such as a small conference, you could have people based all over the world - the system takes care of everything."
Innovation in mobile
The past five years have all been dubbed the year of the mobile, but 2010 may be the real deal.
Sabre has launched its mobile TripCase application, which was available initially on the iPhone but now also on the BlackBerry and Windows Mobile devices. It will soon support Google's Android operating system, too. TripCase lets travellers track and share their itineraries, and get up-to-the-minute information on flight status, delays and cancellations, security queuing times at the airport and even details of the baggage claim carousel.
Amadeus is stepping up its investment in mobile, according to Lacroix: "The shift towards mobile [devices] is actually happening quicker than what we thought. We had a naïve view that people using a mobile device would just want to look up their itinerary and trip approval. What we are seeing now is that people want to go all the way and use their BlackBerry or iPhone to take care of the entire booking process as well as the much harder process of re-booking."
The big game-changer, was the launch of the Apple iPhone, although it hasn't yet made too many in-roads into the corporate market yet.
"That is changing fast though since Apple is now able to replicate corporate email, using Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes," he says.
Lacroix sees tools developing for four main platforms: the iPhone, the BlackBerry, Java-based smartphones and, since their recent launch, Google's Android-based phones.
The success of Apple's App Store has also meant a headache for travel companies wanting to go mobile. Mobile phone users are now demanding apps that are purpose-built for their devices rather than standard tools accessible through the phone's web browser, which could be common among various types of phone.
"We could make do with simple web pages but the iPhone community craves more. People download so many apps whose richness is so much higher than you get with a browser and so we have to push something out as an app," says Lacroix.
Meanwhile, TripIt, the travel planning service that lets you manage your trips and synchronise them with your desktop calendar, has been rolled out for the BlackBerry. The service, previously available on iPhone and Google Android, now lets BlackBerry users access their itineraries no matter how they booked their trip. When a TripIt user books a trip, they just send the confirmation email to a central address and the information is culled from it and placed in a master itinerary. TripIt can handle confirmation emails from hundreds of travel companies, including a wide range of UK TMCs, airlines, hotels and other booking sites.
Other innovation
This year will also see the launch of an innovative new service from Carey, the worldwide chauffeur company. Embarque launches this spring and offers point-to-point and airport transfer services in London and the southeast of England. The service will be operated using Ford Galaxy MPV vehicles and offers highly competitive rates, which do not change day or night. For example, the company will charge £25 plus VAT and a £4 administration charge for a trip from central London to Heathrow.
Hotel booking agency BSI has recently launched its new Traveller and Meetings Tracker Tool, which lets travel managers track the location of employees travelling on business in real time. It uses a geo-coded database to plot bookings on a global map with zoom functionality to assist in locating and identifying employees potentially affected by an emergency or security incident. Multiple colour-coded icons communicate an associated level of risk; red icons highlight areas that are enduring major ongoing security issues or an immediate security threat. While at the other end of the scale, green icons indicate safe areas.