The pandemic made more companies question the value of business travel, but at the same time, reliance on the partners that help manage it grew. According to a Global Business Travel Association survey last month, 52 percent of more than 300 travel buyers said their organizations’ reliance on travel management companies for service and support…
As a percentage of airline passengers boarded globally, those who booked via global distribution systems in the years leading up to the pandemic roughly equaled those who booked directly with carriers. That changed when corporate travel all but evaporated. Leisure travelers booking on airline websites took a greater share, and the balance isn’t back. Whether…
Festive Road’s Paul Tilstone interprets recent survey results about corporate clients’ relationships with travel management companies suggesting that even in the face of current market pressures, TMCs need to stay on their toes and grow investment in servicing and content. In 2017, we surveyed the sector on the TMC sourcing process and discovered there was…
Should you Zoom or should you go? Veteran travel industry advisor Scott Gillespie developed a simple tool to help decide. There are others, and he expects more. There’s pent-up demand for in-person connections, but Covid brought new obstacles to whether and how they’re made. The reduction in office use, widespread adoption of virtual conferencing technology…
In a November paper that otherwise favored optimizing indirect procurement over outsourcing it, McKinsey & Co. suggested companies consider outsourcing travel procurement. It’s debatable whether outsourcing purchasing in indirect categories such as travel saves money. Nevertheless, some industry pros figured current cost pressures in certain industries would prompt more companies to look at outsourcing travel…
People called for a restructuring of travel management company pricing for years before the pandemic; now, some call it urgent. Stopgaps are in place in some environments, allowing, for example, a corporate account to pay to retain dedicated counselors. In the long run, though, many see a need to change a pricing structure that mostly…
Job No. 1 for today’s managed travel program is understanding fluid government and supplier policies, and preparing travelers for what they’ll face on the road. Safety aside, crossing state or country borders is challenging, if not impossible, depending on the latest entry and exit rules. No one wants a traveling employee to run into unexpected,…
