Much of the rationale for a managed travel program is providing appropriate and satisfactory service to corporate travelers. That means working with airlines, hotels, ground transport firms, travel management companies, tech providers and others to optimize each step of a trip, from booking and planning through to post-trip reports and surveys.
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AmTrav CEO Jeff Klee argues that consolidation, legacy tech and outdated thinking sacrifice the industry’s greater good.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…
Arranging and purchasing travel for guests, interns, recruits and other non-employees is perceived by some to be challenging enough that focusing on it helped the entrepreneurs at Pana build a company interesting enough to be acquired. Spend management firm Coupa had other reasons to pay $48.5 million plus stock for Pana, and some customers now are…
Travelport this month announced enhancements including a self-service portal allowing travelers to manage their bookings. The portal was one reason longtime Travelport subscribers Christopherson Business Travel and Fox World Travel upgraded to the new Travelport+ platform. The pair also cited multisource content aggregation, new merchandizing capabilities and more automation for things like ticket exchanges. Travelport…
“Buyers want it; sellers need it,” according to Harvard Business School professor Doug Chung, McKinsey & Company partners Isabel Huber and Jean-Charles Devignes, and McKinsey associate partner Tom Clauwaert. “It’s not trivial, but it’s not rocket science either.” During the early stages of the pandemic, many B2B companies considered remote interactions as a temporary patch,…
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