Utilising data for the management of business travel

Transcription

1 Utilising data for the management of business travel Good afternoon. As I look around the room I see a lot of familiar faces, but for those you who have not met me, my name is Glenn Watson. I am the Business Solutions Manager for the Advantage Focus Partnership. The Advantage Focus Partnership represents over 60 TMCs who are part of the Advantage Travel Partnership the UK s largest travel consortia. My role encompasses technology solution procurement, consulting and supplier management for our Partners to help them service their corporate clients with best in class products. Today I will be speaking about utilising data for the management of business travel, and exploring some of the technology opportunities, some obvious blockers, and ways to increase margins through better communication with your traveller. If you ve spent any time reading RFP responses put together by TMCs, most will tell you their number one proposition is Customer Service. A growing number of successful TMCs include technology in their key offering, but as an enabler, not as a replacement for Service. Therefore, it s incredibly important to tie the two together, and use technology to enhance your customer service, making the corporate client want to stay with your agency as they are getting the best service backed up by a good technology experience. During the sales and implementation process we get to know our client intimately, often meeting travel bookers and sometimes even the challenging travellers who we have to work extra hard to get on side to book with us, instead of going off and doing their own thing. We should spend more time understanding their needs and why they are not engaging. Maybe they think they will not get access to their yearly first class upgrade that the supplier offers if booking via a travel agency. They could also have fears that they may not wish to disclose to an agency. This is the start of the profile process for which most business travel processes rely on and therefore we should focus more closely on this aspect. There are numerous tools that we can use to capture profile information. Most corporate travellers have a profile stored, either at the contracted travel agency, with their travel booker or personal assistant, and usually there are multiple snippets of information held direct with travel providers in the form of frequent flier information or historic travel preferences. In most cases these sources of information are not linked but technology has moved on to allow synchronisation of these details. Take for example Amadeus, who integrates with British Airways Frequent Flier program and allows you to create a PNR from the entry of the frequent traveller card number only. All stored traveller preferences are then imported into the booking process and preferred seats assigned. This is not only time saving for agencies but also reduces errors introduced manually through incorrect data translation.

2 With technology moving forward at a rapid pace and many developers using similar languages and development platforms, we can connect more disparate data sources together than ever before. This leads us to question whether technology is a blocker and which area we should focus on to get the biggest gains. I believe the key to personalisation that will create a sticky client is not solely in developing your technology, but in educating your client and breaking down traditional barriers. As a travel management company you should try to personalise behaviour, not products. Let s take a look at some of the influences in the decision making process when booking a business trip. All too often I see TMCs pandering to the needs of the travel bookers - or the travellers who yell the loudest. For example, we put in workarounds to suppress confirmations being sent to a handful of senior executives who don t want to receive any information from sources other than their designated travel booker, who goes so far as to check them in and arranges their life to the n th degree so that they hit the ground running at the other end of their flight with all services triple checked. Automation cannot assist in this instance as the trust lies between the traveller and their travel booker. Corporate travellers all have their personal preferences, whether that is an airline they absolutely have to fly because they have loyalty points, a specific seat they must sit in every time, or their favourite room in the hotel they always stay in and some requests go so far as stating the colour of the carpet or types of curtains in their room We ve all had an or phone call from a travel booker advising their traveller cannot stay in a room with floral curtains right? Increasingly we are hearing of travellers being given an individual travel budget as part of their remuneration package. Is this an opportunity or a threat to corporate travel management companies? Personally I see this as an opportunity to use data in conjunction with savvy account management skills to meet the needs of both the traveller and their finance department. With a mix of technology and data we can start to make an impact from the first day a new account starts trading. The first variable to consider is how prescriptive or how complex the corporate travel policy is. Has your corporate client provided a list of preferred hotels, with negotiated rates that include all bookable extras or is there scope to introduce suitable suppliers to book the ancillaries? This data is valuable, and allows us to manage the choices we give to our corporate travel booker or their traveller. To do this we should look to other industries and mimic some of their techniques.

3 In the online retail industry, the leader that we should look to is Amazon. When you search for a product you are presented with a range of items. The price of comparative products could vary considerably and you can buy from a plethora of suppliers sound familiar? Add to this more detailed search preferences and all of a sudden your results are ordered by relevance rather than price. If you haven t set your budget and are not willing to stick to buying what you need - rather than what is recommended then you are likely to spend more than you wanted to. Our corporate travel booker could get a little stressed when they are provided with too many options and will sometimes have to choose between their traveller being booked within company policy or with their own preferred supplier. If your traveller has control of their own budget they may try to book with suppliers who have tailored their offerings based on data they hold about your traveller. Some suppliers in the travel industry are great at personalising their products. We need to keep adapting to the threats posed by suppliers who are making it easy to book with them by offering Amazon Echo or Google Home integration or Apple iwatch booking apps. Why call a travel agent and pay a transaction fee if I can simply ask Alexa for advice is a question already being asked by these travellers. We need to get smarter and predict where the traveller will go based on what we know about them. This is a lot easier to do when we have historic information at our fingertips and many of us do right there in front of you, in the database. However, databases are about as much fun to read and decipher as trying to memorise the phonebook. Add to that the complication of the data is always changing and business needs vary depending on the market. We could however make an educated guess about where a traveller may go based on this data if we spot patterns. For example, Bill works for an engineering company and travels to Chicago each April to attend a trade fair. He has done so for the past 3 years and if he is still employed at the company is likely to do so again. We have the details of Bill s travel booker on file as they book his travel each month. Rather than sitting back waiting for the travel booker to contact us and ask for a quote, how about checking flight prices to Chicago around the dates of the trade fair and suggesting the best time for him to book to take advantage of the best fares. After all, there is already technology available that predicts when this might be. You can then employ further technology to bump down the booking classes if cheaper seats become available after ticketing. Or, you could personalise the behaviour by integrating with artificial intelligence products such as Amy the X.ai product that manages your diary and sets appointments without the need for human interaction. Couple this with some of the new entrants to the market who suggest the best dates to travel based on routing, price and traveller availability, and you could provide a number of in-policy itinerary options without the need for a human spending hours reactively searching requests.

4 Every day we are seeing more and more personalised offers in our inbox, as we seem all too willing to trade a little information about ourselves in order to receive something that we want usually a short term gain without thinking through the consequences of divulging this information. How many Sales and Implementation Teams are asking their customers about the company bring your own device policy, to understand what devices other than the company issued phone the traveller may use on their trip or in their own time? Are you using this data, along with the readily available statistics on device type, screen resolution, browsing and booking habits to personalise your agency offering? We should be storing more information in our traveller profiles than merely seat and meal preferences. The new fields should include media used, times of the day your website or online booking site was accessed, travel options provided and have links to the corporate travel policy to show savings offered against those realised. Airlines, hotels, some corporate travel agencies with their own data analysts and many ancillary suppliers are already doing this serving relevant content, at just the right time to the traveller or travel booker and gaining more business as a result. Are you partnering with an innovative business intelligence partner to help expose and use the data you are collecting? If the answer is no, you re not alone. But I would start to think now about looking for partners to help you achieve this. Speed to the market is key. If you can t or don t want to keep up then you will be left behind. The leisure travel industry is taking the lead here. Each is fought hard for and at a recent airline innovation show I attended there were more data driven content personalisation providers than I had expected to see. Each solution provider could help you place targeted content in front of the traveller that matched their search history and helped you maximise revenue. We could learn a lot from these applications and start to apply their logic in the corporate travel space. However, the key to getting buy in is for Account Managers to engage with their key contacts to understand the appetite for this approach. Many travel bookers are scared to use online corporate travel booking tools yet they quite happily book their own holidays online and shop around sometimes as many as 15 sites before making a purchase. This goes to show that we can personalise a product all we want but until we personalise the service there is little or no trust as often travel bookers are scared to spend the company money. They are afraid that if they book the wrong date / times or booking class that there is no recourse and they will be left out of pocket.

5 Going back to the earlier scenario, if we take the stress out of the travel booking experience by using data to improve confidence and demonstrate to the travel booker that they are booking the flight to Chicago that 80% of travellers who flew that route on company business last year took then we are likely to see more compliance, less leakage and hopefully fewer requests to change flights after ticketing. We may also be able to suggest a flight that others are taking on the same day and offer to share ground transport arrangements if we see them travelling for the same reason or under a grouped cost code. These ideas are not entirely new just underutilised. There are several reasons for this. Lack of investment in technology at an agency level Lack of control within the corporate client allowing leakage Or Privacy the number one challenge agencies face. Travel is an emotive subject, and some travellers prefer to keep their preferences or details of their bookings private. Others are willing to share within their peer groups. Establishing and maintaining who should and should not be able to see data is a constant struggle. Managing notifications, visibility of data within reports and what data is fed into the data warehouse is a full time job that many corporate travel management companies simply don t have the resource to maintain. Single suppliers don t have these concerns they operate in a managed ecosystem selling a single product type. Their universe is their company, and they are able to focus on your customer using all the communication tools and data stored about your customer to market their product in the best way they can. They track behaviour to personalise their product the opposite of what we are asked to do by the procurement manager who took you onboard as their preferred travel management company. This bring us onto NDC an acronym that we have heard for the past few years but may not fully understand. New Distribution Capability is already a reality and both technology providers and GDS s are serving airline NDC content to your agency in some form. NDC is simply a structured set of questions and answers that we can use to provide richer content to the traveller or travel booker to aid them in their decision making process. Airlines acknowledge they are not set up to service corporate clients directly, and most will tell you they don t want to perform this role they are starting to understand the value of the TMC community once more. However, we have heard repeatedly that suppliers sell more products using their direct channels than agents offer. Their content will always be available via multiple sources. It s up to us as business travel agents to do more to put the right content in front of the traveller or their travel booker at the right time if we are to remain relevant and indeed profitable. We should be using data we already hold to personalise offers for our traveller and start to bundle packages that meet their needs.

6 Not long ago all airfares included checked in luggage, a drink onboard and a meal. There was a clear distinction between Economy, Business and First Class and lounges were for the privileged. All of this changed as the no-frills carriers entered the marketplace and introduced menu pricing for add-ons to the seat cost advertised. Suppliers throughout the industry (not just the airlines) looked on in awe and suddenly wanted a slice of this lucrative pie, racing to unbundle their offering. The race to the bottom (in pricing terms) was never going to be sustainable and the sale of the ancillary products became more important to keep the suppliers afloat. Technology had not kept pace with this trend and was geared towards selling flights with the only differentiator being price and seat pitch. The information about each airline was stored by agents in folders on their desk and comparisons of service and onboard facilities were not proactively discussed. Data continued to be collected and fed into the database but that s largely where it has remained. Maybe NDC should stand for Now Delivering Choice We should be looking at ways of presenting the traveller with options using a data driven approach, improving the customer service experience for the travel booker by anticipating their needs and making technology easier to use. I know that for me the next few months will be kept busy advising my agencies on how they can harvest their data more efficiently and invoke better conversations with their corporate customers, whilst keeping an eye on the ever changing privacy landscape. We are all data processors and face more controls being placed on how we manage the personal data held in order to move people around the world. The General Data Protection Regulation which comes into force in May 2018 will have an impact in every aspect of our businesses, and I can already foresee the need to bring in experts to help agencies maintain compliance. This will not stop us from using many of the techniques we discussed but potentially adds another layer of controls to the already complex data management programme. The answer to the age old question of how can we become more profitable whilst adding value to our client is right under your nose. A quote from a McKinsey & Co report from 2013 sums this up well; First, companies must be able to identify, combine, and manage multiple sources of data. Second, they need the capability to build advanced-analytics models for predicting and optimizing outcomes. Third, and most critical, management must possess the muscle to transform the organization so that the data and models actually yield better decisions.

7 I too believe the last point is the most salient, and if you take nothing else away from today s conference other than an action to investigate the data you hold and see how it can help your business to service your customer better then I consider that to be a successful day out.