Any corporate travel operations professional can tell you that a lot of business travel bookings start with email. Sometimes this takes the form of a request that, once approved, moves to a travel agent for booking. Ideally it’s generated by an interface like a web page form that structures the output. But that’s not always…
SAP Concur last month demonstrated a chatbot that would answer client employees’ frequently asked questions about travel and expense policies. As long as it works, what travel manager wouldn’t want a virtual assistant? “Often I can’t remember how much I am allowed to spend,” said SAP Concur vice president of customer strategy David Ball at…
Georgia-based Travel Incorporated expects later this month to publish its voice-response assistant on Amazon’s Alexa Skills store. The product remained in the design stage for nearly two years as the travel management company learned how users interacted. Some other providers that built natural language technology reported tepid interest. It was an interactive storyboard concept that solved…
Artificial intelligence will mean many things to many industries. In travel management, it already helps to personalize booking experiences for travelers. Moving forward, it also will streamline workflows, minimize risk and generally alter service delivery. AirPlus International executive director of marketing Yael Klein discusses the potential as society feels its way through the early days…
There are lots of buzzwordy technologies coming to the fore. We use many of them in our everyday lives whether or not we realize it, and they are making their way to corporate travel. Some real-world applications already are in play while other use cases are just now starting to emerge. Lumo chief commercial officer…
Change is constant, yet change is hard. That’s the quandary many in the travel industry face, especially as it relates to distribution. Tried and true technologies continue to operate as designed decades ago, with speed and reliability. However, changing traveler demands and nearly universal access to information have some calling for new designs. Kurt Knackstedt…
Chatbot maker 30SecondsToFly accepted an unspecified investment from eGlobalfares, a dozen-year-old fare search tech provider that serves a few hundred travel agencies globally. The deal also extends 30Seconds’ strategy to market to travel management companies. The partnership enables eGlobalfares customers to offer public and proprietary fares through the Claire chatbot to business travelers. Claire is…
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