With the travel landscape turning out to be a “Crystal Maze” (do you remember one of epic British shows that test one’s skill, mental and physical ability?) over recent years, today’s business travellers has become much more demanding in terms of personalization, choice, connectivity and flexibility like never before. Therefore, how is today’s travel shaping up and where is that it’s leading us to?
The typical business traveller of 2017 was more self-serving and managed his own/her bookings, which is a clear indication of how mobile technology and mobile/ web-based apps are increasingly becoming important. During 2016, there was a significant increase in the travel bookings around the globe through mobile devices and app booking, accounting for 35 – 40% of mobile-based bookings. This phenomenon will increase manifold as today’s travellers are super-connected, both on as well as off the trip, with about 46% valuing free Wi-Fi as a must have amenity in hotel rooms.
Travellers’ pre-trip decisions are based on social media signals such as online customer reviews, ratings, search rankings and social conversations. To corroborate this point further, the number of travel stories shared on Facebook accounts for 42%, which makes it the most shared among all categories. To top it all, Facebook reported that an incredible 200+ million reviews were registered online. These are overwhelming statistics, a clear-cut indication of how travellers, be it leisure or business (bleisure), are transforming this space into a completely personalized program. How bankable the social reviews is a bone of contention.
“What business travellers should be looking at is to combine personal touch with curated travel content and wide array of smart tools —it turns out to be a winning combination,” says Thiagarajan Rajagopalan of Tripeur. This smart combination should enable the business traveller to pick the right hotel at the right spot with adequate amenities, recommend a flight at the right time, and the right ground transportation to reach the destination.
Any technology investment should focus on providing the right content that should interact directly with travellers, which is of utmost significance in this hyper-connected world. It should enable them to remain relevant in a world of increasing complexities and choices.
Tripeur is a state-of-the-art, cloud-based travel management platform for businesses, which empowers company travel managers and CFOs to fully manage the travel experience of their employees with bookings and changes, travel policy compliance, authorization, duty of care and travel spend reconciliation from anywhere in the world. It continues to invest in these digital assets as part of its growing strategy to serve the rapidly growing digital economy in the global business travel industry.