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.
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…
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AmTrav CEO Jeff Klee argues that consolidation, legacy tech and outdated thinking sacrifice the industry’s greater good.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…
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,…
It’s a chicken-and-egg scenario as corporate travel management companies face hard decisions on staffing. When clients resume traveling, they need reliable, expert service more than ever. But with demand in doubt, how proactive can TMCs be in bringing back their people and recruiting more? It’s a question that begets more. How have agent roles been…
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