The value of business traveller’s feedback for Corporations

Amadeus is helping corporations better serve their traveller’s expectations by providing Trusted Reviews .

Today, 82% of young corporate travellers are looking for travel-submitted ratings and reviews, according to a recent Phocuswright study, in order to choose the best option for them, as they are not only focusing their choice on the location, the price and the description of the hotel property but also on what the experience will be. This is why they say that reviews from other travellers have the biggest influence on their choice. Furthermore, reviews from colleagues are ranked second for what business travellers would like to see in a self-booking tool. This means that they are not looking for feedback from other travellers, but mainly for reviews that come from other business travellers at least, or from their own colleagues, at best.

We’ve been working on trusted feedback from peers for some time now. We started collecting reviews in 2007 from German speaking countries for the leisure segment with TravelTainment , the Amadeus leisure group. Since then, we have developed offers specifically dedicated to serving business travellers who use our corporate booking tool Amadeus e-Travel Management . In December 2013, we started Trusted Reviews, which collects and displays reviews in Amadeus e-Travel Management, and the tool is now gathering great momentum as it is being activated by more than one corporation a day. The overall feedback we have received from corporations is very positive and we are continuing to develop the tool to meet new requests.

We are delivering the best information and tailoring it to what corporations are asking for. The benefit for travellers is that they can get reliable insight into which hotel to choose on a trip, whilst at the same time sharing their own feedback with colleagues and other corporate travellers. In parallel, the benefits for travel managers are extensive, including an increased control of the quality of service provided to their travellers, a more flexible property selection that is adapted to traveller needs and, eventually, the possibility to negotiate better deals with suppliers based on the feedback.

What’s next? Traveller’s feedback for the air experience. Within the corporate segment, I believe we will move forward and provide many more reviews, not only on the hotels, but also on air travel. This feedback will provide more information for decision making and, at the end of the day, it will help travel providers offer a much more personalised and rewarding experience to their travellers.