Executing an acquisition or merger can be tricky, and there have been several in the corporate travel space recently. Katharine Farrell of the Dots & Lines consultancy looks back at previous examples of brand consolidation in the industry and contemplates the pros and cons. May was an interesting month for the corporate travel industry. The…
The planned acquisition by American Express Global Business Travel of Egencia has multiple implications depending on the party in question. For GBT, it’s about scale, particularly in the online midmarket. GBT has long coveted this segment, which has a fresh batch of well-funded competition. The deal will avail GBT’s big corporate accounts of more attractive…
Delivering Covid-related info in the booking path is a challenge that may perpetuate outsized reliance on human support, but tech is the long-term answer. Booking tool developers hope that when corporate travelers come back in earnest, they’re pleasantly surprised by improved user experiences. Systems tap some of the same sources for Covid details that, pre-pandemic,…
[CLARIFICATIONS, March 23, 2021: BCD Travel and Sammit Khanndeparkar of Springer Nature provided additional information to help the reader’s understanding of the developments covered in this article. Firstly, while Springer in 2019 spent nearly $40 million annually on travel and entertainment in 75 countries, BCD Travel’s portion of the account represented about $11 million and 11…
As various industry entities work on the problem of informing business travelers of whether they can or should go here or there, and what they need to do, a new player from the world of data science appears to have something new. Using more than 30 data sources, GoPass Global’s APIs reflect pandemic conditions through…
Pundits are kicking around when and whether business travel will recover, but the pivotal question is how. It’s all about cooperation. Teamwork has had mixed success this year at the industry and federal levels. Days away from the psychological clean slate of 2021, Mike McCormick’s Travel Again released a framework for recovery. Backed by the…
With reaction, assessment and recovery on their minds, corporate travel professionals understandably did not focus closely on airline distribution developments this year. Inasmuch as they did, for some, it was a question of how the relevant systems could help the response to the pandemic — or not. There’s some debate about how soon the usually…
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