You don’t need me to tell you most corporate online booking tools (OBTs) are past their sell-by date. Your travellers are probably already telling you they stink.
Generally, OBTs haven’t innovated for years, leaving them way behind the sexy consumer booking sites and apps travellers find on their mobile devices. The threat to your managed travel programme is massive: if your travellers book elsewhere, you don’t know what they’re spending, or where they are.
What’s the answer? Today, there are two competing solutions in the marketplace. The first is open booking, aka Travel Management 2.0. Travellers book what they like through any booking channel they like, then their company claws back some control by attempting to collect their trip data (such as by making travellers enter corporate IDs on supplier websites or key details into a database).
Open booking does allow travellers to avoid Mark 1 OBTs, but it creates lots of new problems too. Above all, you aren’t going to capture all your data. Open booking data gathering processes are clunky at best, leading to reduced control over spend, loss of preferred supplier deals and weaker duty of care, while, for travellers, the extra admin is almost as irritating as using Mark 1 OBTs.
That’s why KDS thinks the genuine solution to the OBT crisis is to make OBTs better. A new generation of OBTs providing more value and using door-to-door (D2D) planning. All the traveller needs to do is enter where their journey starts, where it finishes and when they need to arrive. Almost immediately, they receive a fully scheduled and costed itinerary, including flights, rail, hotels and ground transfer options at both ends of the journey. D2D tools are also much more graphical – years ahead of the accounting software look of Mark 1 tools.
D2D is so fast and attractive your travellers will remain inside your managed travel programme because they won’t find anything that better meets their needs in the consumer world. To paraphrase a famous Paul Newman quote: “I have a 12oz steak at home, so why go out for burgers from three different outlets?” Open booking is a cure that’s worse than the symptoms. The real answer is door-to-door.
Oliver Quayle is senior VP of products, partners and marketing at travel and expenses firm KDS