The hospitality industry’s labor issues make it hard to provide the services many corporate travelers expect. According to hotel company execs, service levels are recovering but at different paces depending on location. Travel buyers understand the staffing dilemmas facing many properties and try to ensure travelers know what they’ll encounter. Beyond the immediate term, some…
Business travel is back but management infrastructure is not, creating a stressed-out industry. For now, corporate travel professionals are doing whatever they can that’s within their control. That includes managing expectations among the traveling population and with senior execs, retraining employees on policies and procedures, updating profiles and preaching patience. A little finger-pointing is going…
Corporate travel is finally showing signs of a sustained recovery, but its susceptibility to exogenous shocks has never been more apparent. Will it return to the levels of 2019, and if so, when? That’s anyone’s guess. CWT wants its answers to be more informed and, in February, began a three-month pilot with a startup analytics…
Customer service chatbots may finally become more intelligent, more conversational and more helpful. By Steve Lohr. Some household gadget is misbehaving and you need help. Or you have a question about travel arrangements or insurance coverage. You go to the company’s website and a digital imp pops up in a small text window. “How can…
It isn’t easy to make a going concern out of selling standalone corporate self-booking software. Commenting last year on why he didn’t want to be in that business, veteran travel tech exec Greg Webb, CEO of Travelport, couldn’t resist using the word commodity. He said corporate booking tools were often part of broader solutions and…
AmTrav CEO Jeff Klee argues that consolidation, legacy tech and outdated thinking sacrifice the industry’s greater good. Travel buyers, he asserts, must demand more innovation from providers. A few years ago Elon Musk and Warren Buffett had a pretty entertaining Twitter spat about moats – not the canal-around-the-castle kind, but the economic kind that companies…
By Ceylan Yeginsu, with Aina Jabeen Khan contributing from London. In Britain and Denmark most coronavirus restrictions have been lifted, including mask mandates; Austria and the Netherlands have eased lockdown measures despite surges in cases, and in late January, the European Union recommended that vaccinated residents should not be required to undergo testing or quarantine…
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