Business travel is all about productivity — whether that relates to its fundamental use for more efficient collaboration, guarding against bureaucracy to ensure seamless collaboration, or generally purchasing the right services at the right prices so trip missions deliver the most value. It also means helping employees avoid getting bogged down in post-trip red tape. The coverage below digs into issues, processes, tools and tricks.
[UPDATE, Jan. 26, 2023: This article did not properly describe ARC’s Direct Connect initiative; its definition is updated below.] We start with some good news. ARC president and CEO Lauri Reishus told attendees to The Beat Live in December that the pandemic caused fewer travel agency closings than ARC had anticipated. Back in 2020, Reishus…
Researchers again found virtual communication offers “limited” capacity to replace face-to-face meetings. But with support for predicted reductions of between 20 percent and 30 percent in business travel volume due to trends accelerated by the pandemic, they argued that understanding how businesspeople choose between travel and virtual “has become urgent.” Researchers at the University of…
For more than two decades, Alicia Grandey, a professor of psychology at Penn State, has been studying how the mistreatment of frontline service workers affects their health and productivity. The behavior she examines ranges from verbal abuse to racial or sexual harassment. She also looks at ambiguous circumstances, in which it’s unclear whether any harm…
American Airlines is sunsetting its prepaid AirPass program and, according to sources, cutting corporate allocations for ConciergeKey, the invite-only top level of its loyalty program. American gave no rationale for its decision regarding AirPass, a program that began in the 1980s and started adding corporate-level members in the 1990s. “Beginning Nov. 30, the AirPass program…
Sabre-owned virtual payments company Conferma Pay expects by January to provision virtual cards into digital wallets for travel bookings. It’s another means for virtual payment to dispense with 20th-century technology. Faxes now handle a minority of Conferma Pay’s virtual card authorizations to hotel properties, with more reliable, secure email and API connections growing in usage…
Cross-border corporate trips made a big comeback this year. According to American Express Global Business Travel, international bookings during the three months ending in September reached 67 percent of their 2019 level — surpassing the domestic recovery. That occurred even with some key markets remaining closed. What about the long term? Rana Forhoohar, a columnist…
Are native travel management company mobile apps obsolete? That’s Darryl Hoover’s question. The Direct Travel chief technology officer was playing out the implications of the company’s revised digital strategy. Leveraging collaboration platforms including Microsoft’s Teams and Salesforce’s Slack, he said, allows the travel management company to meet customers where they are. That’s a lot easier…
End of content
End of content
