Before the pandemic, American Airlines crowed about adding to its sales force and growing market share in corporate travel. Conditions have changed. Both corporate travel and airline capacity growth are depressed. Improving profitability and paying down debt are top priorities. After cutting back last year on customer benefits including perks and discounts, now AA is saying goodbye to its…
[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…
“As we all know,” said S&P Global director of global travel and meetings Ann Dery, “TMC data is horrendously awful.” Dery’s comment at the Global Business Travel Association convention in August elicited faux disbelief from co-panelist Steve Sitto, senior group manager for global travel, events and mobility supply chain at Tesla. They elaborated. “I don’t…
There was a time when 30-year-old travel tech provider Cornerstone Information Systems saw an exchange on one in five tickets issued. Now that’s up to between one-third and half. This has huge implications for corporate travel services, labor and costs — as the industry has seen since business travel came back in earnest. Unfortunately, it’s…
In recent decades sweeping reengineering, digitization and agile initiatives — and lately the move to remote work — have dramatically transformed the job of managers. Research shows that most managers are struggling to keep up. Managers now have to think about making their teams successful, rather than being served by them; coach performance, not oversee…
Spend management company Emburse released a mobile app for managing “every aspect” of a business trip. The Emburse Go digital companion for iOS and Android devices is a scalable, down-market, less customized version of the Roadmap app that Emburse acquired in 2021. It’s available for a spending-based fee to Emburse’s 16,000 small and medium-sized expense…
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…
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