New York – Spotnana officials have been calling it the AWS of travel, but the reference only gets you so far outside tech and investment circles. Concepts like open stack and microservices help a little. In corporate travel, though, people want to know whether you are attempting to be a GDS, an OBT, a TMC…
With uncharacteristic bluntness, two key providers in corporate travel this month separately identified inhibitors to progress. A Delta distribution exec urged buyers to pressure SAP Concur to get its act together. Sabre leaders criticized widely used corporate airfare policies as archaic. And it’s not just them; perhaps the pandemic is a boon for plain speaking….
Corporate travel and travel tech luminaries, including a former ARC CEO and former GBTA executive director, are helping a veteran of the air consolidator business break into corporate travel. Onriva, originally incorporated six years ago as Onvoya, applies machine learning and artificial intelligence in a marketplace that promises to deliver personalized travel options via mobile…
Air Canada 18 years ago debuted fare families, a response to low-cost competition that set off a revolution in airline pricing. The company’s decision shortly thereafter to make some fares exclusive to its direct channels augured similar moves more than a decade later by big carriers in Europe and elsewhere. Is Montréal changing the game…
Airline distribution expert Cory Garner last week contemplated whether or not “product-based” airline displays were compatible with the indirect distribution channel favored by corporate travel programs. It’s very difficult, he said, and getting it done requires “a lot of alignment and consultation amongst the various stakeholders.” Those are not hallmarks of the historical relationships between…
Blockchain is a big deal for EY, so that means it’s a big deal for EY’s travel department. The professional services firm, one of BTN’s top-ten spenders on corporate travel in the United States, will test distributed ledger technology for contract support with an unnamed airline. During a BTN Group-hosted webinar sponsored by the International…
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…
