Carlson Wagonlit Travel has identified five key trends which will have the greatest impact on business travel going forward.
The ‘Faster, Smarter, better?’ study highlights mobile technologies, customisation, the sharing economy, new booking solutions and virtual payments as the ones to watch.
It’s not rocket science but more a study into the attitudes of travellers and travel managers about current technology trends – travellers expectations have risen, the travel management community is thinking how to react.
The first two trends speak for themselves, consumers rely heavily on mobile devices daily and expect them to extend more to their working lives.
Mobile technologies was rated the highest with 72% rating it either four or five in terms of having the greatest impact on the corporate travel sector.
CWT is expecting 25% of bookings to come via mobile by 2017 and says it is exploring how to deliver a “mobile-first multi-channel offering.”
And, given how connected they are to those devices they also want the travel services offered on them to be far more tailored.
Through the availability of increasing amounts of data travel management companies and suppliers are seeking to personalise services to travellers.
In the CWT study, travellers ranked customised offers as third in a list of top technology and services they’d like to have in travel programmes, after ancillary services and mobile applications.
The vision is ‘market of one’ and the industry is a way off but companies including CWT and Egencia have introduced more tailored search technology for hotels in the past year.
The other hope for data is to have much better visibility on how effective travel programs are and, on this front, CWT plans to unveil its AnalytIQs platform in the next few months to provide insight on booked and ticketed data.
Data on ancillary spending and program leakage is to be added next year.
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