As I boarded the plane to Nice last week, I felt a sense of excitement to be in the same room as my team. There are so many things we all missed when traveling for business.
It’s hard to quantify the true impact of sharing a meal with members of a global team, shaking hands with a client for the very first time, and brainstorming solutions or exploring new ideas with customers and colleagues over a coffee.
I’m not alone. In a recent study, 84% of business travelers confirmed that they are ready to travel again with the right safety measures in place. Corporate travel has been hit hard, but we are rebuilding it. Technology will no doubt play a big role in speeding up its comeback.
In today’s world, travelers expectations have evolved with COVID-19, heightening the expectations for seamless, touchless, travel. We are committed to transforming the Travel & Expense experience by building the smartest, most connectedcorporate travel ecosystem in the world. With this in mind, I’ve summarised the areas I see as important as we rebuild travel.
1. Employee well-being takes on a new meaning
What’s good for employees is also good for the company. That’s why rebuilding business travel isn’t just about ROI for corporations, it’s also about creating a 360-degree user experience that promotes and facilitates truly personalized experiences throughout an employee’s journey. Not so far away, perhaps employees will receive hotel recommendations based on the experiences of their colleagues or based on how an individual has chosen to travel in the past, and frequent flyers can save all of their favorite flight times and hotels for easy booking in the future.
In addition, travelers could receive notifications for transfers or prompts for in destination services once they arrive. Imagine if a vegetarian traveler could automatically have a map of vegan and vegetarian restaurants near their hotel pop up on their phone once they arrive at their new destination?
With our agile, cloud-based, consolidated and reliable display of all travel vendor content, including NDC, there are many ways to customize booking systems to better serve corporate travelers. This will allow travel programs to achieve that difficult balance between cost optimization CONTROL and traveler’s well-being FLEXIBILITY in a post COVID-19 era.
2. The workplace of the future
COVID-19 has broken through cultural and technological barriers that limited remote work in the past.There has been a structural shift in where work takes place, with employees seeking more family-oriented and desirable destinations. At Amadeus we call this trend the “Workcation”. This could generate a new world of travel needs, business travel could look different as employees will need to connect with colleagues who are no longer working in the same office.
Destinations like the Canary Islands, Cancun, Tulum, Miami and Playa del Carmen are already advertising to remote workers to capitalize on this trend.
One survey found that 60% of decision makers believe remote work will lead to more business travel in the future. And at Amadeus globally,we have already seen a41% increase in the number of searches for 30-day stays
, though the regions varied significantly. In France and Spain, we saw an increase of 75% and 52%, respectively, in searches for 30-day stays.
3. A smarter digital world
We all know that COVID-19 has been an accelerator of technology innovation. After years of incremental, gradual changes, now finally, new digital technologies offer the chance to ‘leap-frog' years in terms of how businesses manage their processes.
In a2020 study by Forrester Consulting , leaders in travel management, HR, procurement, and finance in large enterprises all agreed it was time to banish spreadsheets in favour of digital transformation, to improve the travel and expense management of their organizations. Lengthy, cumbersome processes and tools not only makes it harder to track down the true ROI of business travel, but it impedes business operations, and adds more workload to already overwhelmed employees.
For example, for some companies surveyed it takes 13.6 hours on average to process travel and the associated expenses, from booking to reimbursement for travelers, approvers, auditors and accountants. That’s a lot of lost hours.
By replacing manual and inefficient processes with modern travel and expense tools, companies can reduce the time employees spend on long-winded tasks and leaders can access real-time information to know the true value and ROI of business travel.
4. Invisible control behind touchless expense
Picture this: You’re hopping into a taxi to get to the airport for your next work trip. When you arrive, you pay with your mobile phone, directly from the company bank account, with real-time data about your purchase conveyed automatically to the financial system of the corporation. You won’t have to worry about keeping track of receipts and logging them into an excel spreadsheet when you get home. That’s the vision Amadeus has for a truly end-to-end T&E experience. Right now, only a small percentage of enterprises have an end-to-end cloud-based travel and expense management system in place, but that will change, as machine learning opens new doors to help corporations audit and keep track of business travel value.
For example, in certain markets it’s permitted to run algorithms that audit employee expense claims, so if a taxi trip between the office and the airport typically costs €50, the technology can spot anomalies when it is expensed at €100.
Automation or robotics can undertake repetitive tasks and processes,freeing up travel teams and suppliers to focus their efforts and resource where human thinking and expertise brings greater value.
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There is a huge opportunity to reinvent the employee experience and rethink the way we travel to a more sustainable, collaborative, and smart travel experience. Technology will play a crucial role as an enabler and accelerator of recovery. At Amadeus, we’re committed to help corporations around the world on this path of digital transformation and provide organizations with tools that help bring back traveler confidence as we rebuild travel.
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