INNOVATE 2015
The BTN Group’s Innovate 2015 Conference for the Advancement of Business Travel offered business travel executives the opportunity to articulate priorities and recommendations about five of the biggest challenges facing corporate travel buyers and suppliers:
- Advancing Actionable Intelligence
- Alternative Payment Practices
- The Future of Travel Buying
- The Promise of A Unified Mobile Travel App
- Building A Better Distribution System
The BTN Group worked first with its Advisory Board and then with a dedicated Steering Committee to identify the focus topics for 2015. Business Travel News editors then recruited a group of leading business travel professionals to participate in independent task forces that could identify specific concerns and posit new ideas for moving the practice, the tools and the objectives of business travel management into the future. Think Tank sessions held during the Innovate 2015 Conference served to validate concerns and flesh out innovation concepts. This collection of Innovate white papers—published weekly in January—document those efforts.
The Future of Business Travel Buying
The traditional travel buying process faces assault from a barrage of disruptors, including shifts to open-booking, emerging “sharing economy” platforms and new tools that can track both traveler behaviors and pref¬erences as well as pricing volatility. Fortunately, as many buyers report both diminishing returns and increasing complexity to the traditional request-for-proposal process, some of these disruptors stand to bring welcome change to what can be an increasingly frustrating exercise.
Alternative Payment Practices
It’s hard to imagine a time when the plastic payment card will be obsolete; but the proliferation of mobile devices, the promise of convenience and the assurance of increased security are pushing alternative payment tools to the fore. For corporate travel programs, reconciliation challenges enter the picture along with increased demand for non-traditional travel bookings. The result is an expanding payment landscape, with established suppliers pushing new products and new players emerging.
Building a Better Distribution System
When we talk about distribution, we talk about content, economics, shopping, searching, servicing, data, revenue management and the pace of technological innovation. We also talk about global distribution systems, which for decades have sat at the center of the buying and selling of travel services. Not all associations with the latter have been positive in recent years. Yet, alternatives may be even less so.
Advancing Actionable Intelligence
There isn’t a more basic component of a managed travel program than data: Programs are built on it, contracts negotiated from it and performance evaluated with it. As more complex data enters the picture, suppliers appear ready to reap huge benefits, while the capabilities of corporate travel buyers are lagging.
The Unified Mobile Travel Application
Consumer travel apps are cheap, easy to download and offer choice to business travelers. So why must managed travel duplicate the effort. The short answer is “the slippery slope.” As travel managers work hard to maintain compliance for their travel programs, opening an “app hatch” seems like a dangerous precedent. As the industry progresses toward a unified mobile travel app, though, adoption of such an app shows great potential for ensuring data security, while offering superior user experience to enhance the value of the program. The 2015 Innovate Task Force on the Unified Travel App considered the potential features and developers of such an app, and how to drive adoption.
