Technology will make travelling to internal company meetings obsolete, Herman Mensink, vp EMEA of the Prism Group, said.
Companies will have to travel to keep up relationships with people outside their organisation like customers and suppliers.
But alternatives to travel like video conferencing or e-mailing will replace internal meetings he told a joint BATM/ACTE forum in Brussels this week.
Mr Mensink said travel management was moving from a focus on suppliers and deals to the more strategic role of value or demand management.
This was taking out costs without reducing its capacity to execute its business - "eliminating unnecessary consumption," he said.
The hardest part was creating value for your organisation. There was a big difference between visiting suppliers and customers and holding internal meetings.
He said the crucial questions were 'when did travel result in the highest return for the company?' and 'when can the company better use technology?'
"The real question is not how much a company saves in its travel but rather how much benefit it receives in return,” Mr Mensink told the 75 delegates.
With oil prices rising, hotel rates increasing and the "green" factor an added element, travel managers had to come up with "new concepts so that they can retain the relationships but don't need to travel anymore," he said.
The problem in the past had been a lack of means to measure this.
"You have to understand why employees are travelling and what is expected out of their trips," Mr Mensink said.
To do this it was key for travel managers to become part of the budget cycle and do travel value assessment of trips, to measure every trip.
The data had to be analysed and new tools created to bring a broader approach to value management.
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