Back in February I talked to you about how corporations and TMCs (Travel Management Companies) are adapting to the new world of business travel, based on conversations with 250 executives from around the globe. In this blog, I explore how we, at Amadeus, are adapting to the new requirements arising from this new era of business travel so that corporations can make the most of it.
First, a quick update. The geo-political and macro-economic landscape has changed considerably in the past six months, and this will influence corporate travel patterns in some regions and sectors.
Despite the headwinds, the bigger picture is that the appetite for customer-facing meetings and in-person industry events remains strong. A tClara report this May revealed that eight out of 10 [US] business leaders agree that meeting in person with staff, managers and peers is important, making it easier to build trust, strengthen company culture, and overall increase job commitment.
However, at the same time, the appetite for variations on the “working from home” theme has not diminished. Where the nature of the work allows, more and more corporations are talking about hybrid workplaces, with bosses acknowledging the productivity, engagement and benefits that come from this new work-life balance.
Aligning these two trends, a craving for human interaction and the demand from employees to work remotely, creates a contradiction. Yes, we want face-to-face interactions but at the same time we also want to work from home, or the coffee shop, or a remote-worker-friendly hotel that we’ve all grown accustomed to these past few years.
This contradiction has a name - let me introduce you to the ‘Hybrid Work Paradox’.
The ‘Hybrid Work Paradox’ was framed by Microsoft, one of Amadeus’ strategic partners , and entered the vernacular via a LinkedIn post from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in 2021. The concept emerged from data in the 2021 Microsoft Work Index, which analysed 30,000 responses from 31 countries. The findings that define the paradox are that 73 percent of respondents wanted to keep the flexibility of remote working they experienced during lockdowns, while 67 percent also wanted more in-person time with colleagues.
If we accept that hybrid working is here to stay and will characterize how corporations are structured, then we must accept that the ‘Hybrid Work Paradox’ is also here to stay. This will drive a change in not only the role of travel managers and agents but also how trips are planned booked, paid for, and expensed. In turn, this defines how we at Amadeus develop our portfolio of products for business travel, always innovating for the future.
We strongly believe that the ‘Hybrid Work Paradox’ will drive new business travel opportunities which didn’t exist in the past. There are already examples of companies who pay for the travel and expenses of staff when they come into the office, effectively redefining the one-off commute as a business trip.
But more exciting for us - as a leading global technology company - is how we can connect the tools people use every day for hybrid working; to the tools used for planning and booking business travel in a seamless, collaborative, and forward-looking way. Creating the connection will allow existing use cases for business travel to be fulfilled more efficiently. The hybrid workplace has surfaced many fresh-to-market opportunities.
Our partnership with Microsoft enables Amadeus to create applications which offer unrivalled access into Microsoft’s suite of business software – Microsoft 365, used by more than a million companies worldwide. Earlier this year, the very first iteration of our long-term plan to embed Cytric by Amadeus (both Travel & Expense) with Microsoft 365 went live - named Cytric Easy.
Customers of Cytric Easy can plan and book trips, sharing travel details with colleagues without ever leaving their day-to-day applications, such as Microsoft Teams.
Formalizing access to colleagues’ business travel trip plans, and some of the other features of Cytric Easy, represents a big leap forward when it comes to pan-company collaboration. In the context of the ‘Hybrid Work Paradox’, sharing travel plans can help to rebuild a corporate’s “social capital” the phrase of choice to describe the value that derives from people being in the same room and interacting, whether this is talking shop or talking small. Those water-cooler moments, the strength of human networks, have an important role within a business.
When the workforce is hybrid, and there is no water-cooler to gather round, social capital is threatened . But with a deeply connected collaborative tool such as Microsoft Teams, it is possible to transition offline social capital to a digital equivalent comparable with what can be achieved in the physical world.
There’s a social capital component to business travel. With a collaborative approach, colleagues from different departments, will know who is on the road in the same city, at the same time and can arrange to meet up. Staff arriving at the same airport from different origins can share a cab downtown, improving interaction between colleagues, saving money for the company at the same time as being more sustainable.
Within our agreed framework with Microsoft, Amadeus will continue to develop new features for Cytric Easy which are native to Microsoft 365. Features such as Match my Trip and Share my Ride are being developed as we speak. Development is taking place using the SAFe framework, which means that we will be bringing new features to market regularly and quickly. The platformization of how Amadeus’ tech stack is structured allows for rapid integrations and an ever evolving and increasingly ambitious development roadmap.
Cytric Easy is just the start. It shows what can be achieved by connecting the data available in applications around how people work, with the data related on how people travel. If you layer big data, machine learning and artificial intelligence using native cloud technology to support the latest data science thinking, with the willingness of the traveler to benefit from an improved and more personalized experience, a truly change in thinking in how we travel for business is on its way.
This series of blogs will continue with a focus on how Cytric can help Corporations meet some of their sustainability needs.
TO TOP