Corporate Travel: A glass quarter-full is still a lot
In case you haven’t already done the math – it is now 8 months since China announced the first major shutdown of 20% of the domestic flights and a few international flights back in late January 2020 – and the time has come to accept that we have entered a new phase in the never-ending odyssey known as “the travel industry”.
Travel as we knew it prior to 2020 will not return for an unknown period of time, and rather than keep debating when it might happen I believe the time has come to say “travel has already restarted” and reposition your business according to the new rules rather than hoping you can survive until the old rules potentially return one day.
Starting at the 30,000 feet level, travel is still is a massive industry – if we assume a 75% drop from 2019 there will still be more than 1 billion travelers to service in 2021 – which is an incredible amount of customers in most industries and verticals – so stop “moaning about the drop” and start focusing on securing your fair share of the available market – like any startup has to do when they enter an existing market with a new service offering – focus on the most important things and ignore the items you cannot change or influence!!!
Which leads to the next observation – if you are a TMC or travel supplier then stop saying that it is impossible to change or upgrade your existing technology infrastructure because of Covid-19, when in fact it never will be easier or cheaper to do so – and by the way if you don’t upgrade now you will almost certainly go out of business when your competitors have upgraded as your cost base will be too high and your ability to deliver services in the new world will be inferior compared to those who did upgrade.
With or without Covid-19 the travel industry had actually reached a point where the legacy technology infrastructure was falling apart, but in most cases the problems were hidden or ignored by the fact that the global volume was growing at 4-5% consistently which made it possible to work inefficiently and still survive because of the endless flow of business.
Those days are definitely gone now – if you think you can survive
another year with old outdated human-intensive workflow procedures then
you are in the wrong industry – in order to survive in the Covid-19
world your productivity probably has to increase by at least 50% before
the end of 2020 - and this can only be achieved by eliminating every
process which require a human agent unless you can charge for the
privilege of providing an agent as an fee-based alternative to a simple
and elegant “Do it yourself” service option.
Whether we are talking about the process of searching, booking, changing, cancel (and refund) or upgrading a service, it must be possible for the traveler to do it themselves – and the same goes for the areas of invoicing, credit notes, statements, settlement and balance inquiries which must be self-service capable services. Corporate travel specific features such as profile management, policy configuration (price, service and sustainability), supplier optimization (ie work in Excel) and reporting must obviously also be self-service enabled and highly automated and finally the area of payment has to be simplified and optimized in such a way that we can say goodbye to the expense report completely.
If you are familiar with the technology infrastructure of the
corporate travel world then you are probably thinking “this is not
possible” and you are partly right – because it is not possible with the
existing solutions which have been running for 10-15 years or even
longer in some cases – but it is completely possible with the next
generation of services and solutions arriving in the marketplace at a
perfect time – just when the travel industry actually has the required
time available to say goodbye to the legacy world and move into an open
and inter-connected technology architecture.
As always change is primarily driven by customers so if you are a travel buyer then you should start asking your TMC how old each of their technology solutions actually is – and perhaps create a new SLA requirement which states the average age of their tech stack must be under a certain level – say 5 years – to ensure they provide you with the latest tools and services at the lowest possible cost while still being allowed to make a meaningful profit margin like any other trusted supplier.
Or perhaps you prefer a different model where you create your own tech stack for managing your travel program and simply use the TMC as a “booking service” similar to how you procure a number of other services and products today in your core business
Regardless of which of the 2 models you prefer, they will both lead you down a path with higher efficiency, lower cost of service and most importantly a better travel program as a result.
