A Big Win No One Is Talking About

Two years ago I wrote that travel managers face two paths.

One path is to keep doing what you do today: jumping through endless supplier meetings, putting out fires around traveler service issues, continually hacking away towards inbox zero… In short, doing all those things that add short-term tactical value.

The other path leads to adding higher, more strategic value by focusing on travel’s broader business impact. I’ll preach about taking this path at GBTA in Boston on July 17th.

One area along this path that I think is rife with opportunity is non-employee travel. Think recruiting trips for on-site interviews, new-hire training, or guest visits such as speakers, partners, or customers.

Most all the current corporate travel tools and systems were built for current employees. If you worry that your own travelers don’t enjoy that experience, how do you think your non-employee travelers feel?

4 Services for Reducing Traveler Friction

Reducing Travel Friction

Innovation and traveler friction are popular topics for you folks, so here are a few quick profiles of new ways to make life easier for travelers.

DUFL – Allows travelers to travel without luggage.  A mashup of FedEx and your favorite Downton Abbey butler.  DUFL stocks a private closet with your travel clothes, and sends them to your hotel in advance of your arrival.  You leave the DUFL suitcase at the hotel upon checkout, and DUFL retrieves it, cleans and repacks your clothes, ready for your next trip.  Yes, there is an app for that.  More about DUFL here.

Expensify – Automatically, and near- instantly, reimburses travelers for their on-the-road expenses. Snap a photo of the receipt, and the expense reporting tool automatically cues it for payment the next day.  It’s hard to imagine making expense reimbursement any easier.  More about this feature here. Hat tip to BTN for the coverage.

FlyAnotherDay – Helps travelers and planners avoid trips to major cities around the globe during city-wide events.  An easy way to check a destination’s potential for travel congestion.  A new service with affordable pricing that solves a pesky problem.

What3Words – not really a travel app, but keep reading…this app makes finding places really easy, especially those places without a street address.  Imagine your travelers wanting to meet on a campus for a recruiting trip, or at a ferry point, or an oil rig.  This service makes it easy to identify any location on the globe using three words.  Interesting implications for travel risk management, yes?

 I have no commercial ties to any of these firms; just a fan of their efforts.

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SmartTrip Delivers Shared Travel Savings – Bravo!

Travel managers have a powerful new tool to coax more savings from their travelers.

Runzheimer’s new SmartTrip tool solves the problem with a simple equation:

Good Trip Budgeting + Traveler Self-Interest = Shared Savings

How it works:  The traveler enters the most basic of trip specs: Origination, destination and dates of travel.  The tool produces the trip’s benchmark cost (a best estimate), split out by Air, Hotel, Transportation and Meals. Yes, these estimated costs can be tailored to fit company travel policies, so for example, the estimated hotel costs can be based on 3 star properties, not 4 stars.

With the trip’s benchmark cost in hand, the traveler

ProcureApp’s Clever Compliance Tool

Disclosure: I’ve served  ProcureApp as an unpaid advisor.

Procurement folks hate undiscounted spend.  They’ll love ProcureApp.  Why? Because it detects when a buyer (think traveler) has wandered onto a non-approved supplier’s website. When that happens, a friendly message pops up.

“Pardon me, old chap.  Couldn’t help noticing that you’re on Brand.com’s site.  Not really an approved supplier, are they?  Tsk, tsk. Why don’t we take a nice stroll over to our approved travel site, and do our shopping and booking over there, shall we?”

Beautiful.  A timely message displayed to a traveler at a critical step in the path of non-compliance. Complete with a link to the preferred site.

Short’s Book It: A Brilliant Booking Breakthrough

Short’s Travel, arguably the most innovative TMC in North America, has done it again*.

Book It** allows a corporate traveler to search for airfares on any site, then e-mail the selected flight info to Short’s for booking and en-route servicing. Completely automated. Fast results.  Pure genius.

Why pure genius?  Because, according to
David LeCompte, Short’s president, some two-thirds of corporate travelers are shopping for their airfares on non-corporate websites anyway. Once they find a good flight, they have to re-enter the details into their corporate tool.  Newsflash – not every traveler bothers with that last step.

Then there’s the small problem that consumer OTAs are

Naked Airfares: Price, Quality and Value Revealed

Here’s a great way to see the full value picture when your travelers are shopping for airfares:

InsideTrip calculates a trip quality score for each flight that you’re considering. It factors in a dozen elements covering the itinerary’s speed, comfort and ease.  Even better, travelers can select only those factors that matter to them.

See the big numbers on the right-side of the web page?  Those are the TripQuality scores.  You can use them to sort your flight options, or sort by price, departure time, etc.

This site is, to my knowledge, the first to factor in the quality dimension of airfare purchases.  With price and a quality score, it is now much easier to see differentiated value.

Unexpected Airline Innovations

Two airlines are taking a broader view of their mission.  Virgin Atlantic and Emirates have recently helped bring two innovations to the market, and neither has anything to do with moving people from one airport to another.

Virgin Atlantic has sponsored Taxi2 (www.taxi.to), which helps travelers find ride-share partners at their destination airport.  What a great idea – helps travelers save some money, and reduces carbon emissions by using fewer taxis.

Emirates funded the development of iLingual, an iPhone app that

Cutting Taxi Costs and CO2

You’re in a long line outside an airport, waiting for a taxi and wondering how many people in front of you are going to the same place.  Wouldn’t it be great if you could pair up?  Save time, money and reduce carbon emissions – what’s not to like about that idea?

Well, there are a handful of websites that will help you do just that.  The one that first caught my eye is Taxi2 (www.taxi.to).  Your travelers

Verbal Translation via iPhone

Here’s a cool – bordering on bizzare – new app that your international travelers will want to check out, assuming they have an iPhone:

It is designed to translate spoken English into spoken French, German and Arabic.  It was developed by Lean Mean Fighting Machine for Emirates Airlines, in order to reinforce Emirates as an innovator in the travel space.  Well done on all accounts!

You can find six versions of this app, all free, on the Apple iTunes store.  Here’s the link from the developer’s site, or you can search the app store for the product name iLingual (clever name, that.)

(Thanks to Tnooz for posting on this topic yesterday)

Google’s “Social Search” and Travel

Google is shaking up the travel world again.  I caught this article on Tnooz, just before heading down to the CASMA conference sessions.  That’s on hold until  can get my mind wrapped around this new tool.

Called Social Search, Google taps into your social networks (but only with your permission) to find out what your friends think about whatever search term you’ve entered.   It works with any topic, not just travel.  But for now, think of it as TripAdvisor meets LinkedIn.