In 2009 corporate booking
tools were just starting to gain traction. Get There, Reardon, Cliqbook were
the major players. Since then, these tools and concepts have matured and now some
40 plus percent of corporate travel bookings flow through online booking tools.
Concur has matured the technology to integrate expense management with travel
management and is now a power player (they were recently purchased by SAP), who
not long ago introduced the concept of “open booking” the ability to
manage travel while letting employees book where they prefer, but still capture
all travel related expenses on a single platform. From what I see, the early
hype around open booking hasn’t been matched by rapid adoption. So where will
it go in 2015? Market research firm PhoCusWright predicts that open booking
will gain momentum particularly in the Moderately Managed and Lightly Managed
segments. I believe that PhoCusWright is spot-on with its prediction but that
raises the all-important question: to what extent?
As someone who believes down
to my very soul that Travel and Expense (T& ) needs to be managed and
supervised even more than most top line items, the tools coming into the market
can, will, and should help achieve this concept - not replace it. At its most
basic level, I believe that organizations will embrace open booking if it can
help them effectively manage travel, with greater flexibility and at a lower
cost. The value of these tools all starts with good data. For managed travel to
work, we must first solve the challenge of full data capture. If employees are occasionally
allowed to book through any channel they prefer, there must be a way to bring
all of that data together in a consistent, real-time format.
Current popular solutions rely
on travelers to forward their confirmation emails via alternate sources to a
data aggregator, like True Trip or Trip Link (solutions associated with TripCase
and Concur). These emails are then parsed and converted into useful data for
reporting and other purposes. I believe that 10% of the lightly to moderately
managed market will pay to subscribe to these tools. When they do, and they get
everyone to forward emails to it, the evaluation can then begin. The travel
manager can determine if they have in fact found a better value (as they often
claim), where all travelers are, if they have gone outside of their TMC for a
legitimate reason you can approve in your travel policy moving forward, if and
when preferred supplier agreement should have been used, etc. Together with
their TMC, some of these customers will consider this enhancement and work
through these types of evaluations if they choose to manage travel at a higher
level.
By nature, organizations
considering open booking will tend to have more relaxed cultures. However, that
doesn’t mean that they want a T&E free-for-all. Open booking solutions can
provide support in this area if these tools are used and under the intent of
even more tightly managed travel.
Note: Challenges exist and in
a future article we will address how these and new technologies and
methodologies are beginning to address these issues. It’s no surprise that this
method has gaps that include: road warriors not forwarding their emails to
these data aggregators, preferred supplier agreements cannot be used or
credited when travelers book outside a managed system, how to support these reservations
not made by the TMC - even if the TMC can see them, they don’t own them so
making changes, cancelling, and receiving updates to flight changes and other
services provided by your TMC have to be a more manual process - and how to
measure the impact of time when travelers go outside the system to report on
and reimburse these expenses.
