It’s Time For a New Generation of Travel Management

Next year will mark the 20th anniversary of the dawn of modern travel management.

In 1994 Delta cut commissions to travel agents, turned travel departments into cost centers overnight, and ushered in the need for more sophisticated management of the travel category.

Our industry responded well.  It developed a core set of best practices.  Online booking technology and Prism’s airline contract management tool accelerated the importance of having an effective travel policy.

Consolidation of TMCs, use of procurement techniques, improved data reporting, duty of care – all these and more are now well-known hallmarks of managing a corporate travel program.

We’ve learned how to add value. The body of knowledge is solid, stable, strong.  The castles of best practices have been built.

But castles have limits.  They are neither mobile nor flexible. They aren’t suited for exploration and discovery.  After 20 years, we need explorers willing to chart new courses, to explore new frontiers.

It’s time to search beyond the diminishing returns of Managed Travel 1.0.  

Will Managed Travel 2.0 Do Away With Discounts?

A colleague recently asked if travel suppliers will continue to offer discounts in the world of Managed Travel 2.0.

“Why would suppliers offer discounts under this open booking format?  Why would they simply not let their revenue management team set prices and do away with all discounts?”

Discounts won’t go away in MT 2.0. Here’s why:

Let’s assume that suppliers would still want more than their fair (i.e., unmanaged) share of a corporate account’s business. How will they get that extra share?

Suppliers can expect to get their fair share by

The End of Travel Data Darkness

Ending Travel Data Darkness with a Switch

This is the year in which travel data darkness begins to die.

By data darkness, I mean the opacity of travel booking data made outside of company-approved booking channels.  Exhibit A – hotel bookings made on Brand.com. Given that most companies can’t see 40-50% of their hotel bookings, this is a big black hole for most travel managers. And safety/security managers. And tax managers (more on this later).

Sure, you may get this data via the corporate credit card, or eventually via the expense report, but by then that data’s wattage is pretty dim.  Surely you need brighter data – more detail, in real time, regardless of how or where your travelers book.

No problem.  The solution – conceptually – is so close and so simple. And it has tax benefits to boot.

It’s your company’s

Managed Travel 2.0 – Explanation and Implications

What do chickens and travelers have in common?  Both might be better off without fences.

That’s one of the issues I raised today at The Beat Live’s closing speech.  This speech covered

• The driving forces behind Managed Travel 2.0 and its five key principles
• The three requirements for this concept to take off
• And most intriguingly, several key implications for the major stakeholders in the travel industry.

Here’s the full presentation.  It’s a much deeper presentation than what Evan Konwiser and I covered in Boston at GBTA.  Like that presentation, this one is in ballroom style (pretty pictures, few words), so it loses some punch without the voice-over.   We’ll push out a series of posts to put these pictures into context.

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