The Latest from Traxo

As the global economy begins to reopen, corporate travel teams worldwide are planning for how best to restart their company’s business travel activity. Most firms have made it through the initial “triage” stage of the pandemic. Now, teams are taking stock of how their travel programs performed in the midst of the crisis, in order to assess how they should best move forward in the new travel environment with additional safety protocols and security requirements.

The complexion of recovery planning efforts will differ among companies, but having spoken with dozens of travel teams at companies of all sizes, Traxo has identified a consistently recurring theme across all organizations: full data visibility is now imperative.

Uncertain times – I have lost count of how many times I heard the phrase “uncertain times” over the last two months. Since the spread of COVID-19 began, the world has certainly been faced with innumerable challenges on every imaginable level - physically, mentally, spiritually, and more, especially in the realm of business travel. There are many issues that lend to the uncertainty. Will this pandemic happen again? How long until we get back to “normal”? What will “normal” be? Will we be prepared to combat the virus both now and in the future? There are, however, some topics in the world of corporate travel that many feel certain about.

Travel managers have been on the front line of corporate travel’s response to the COVID-19 outbreak. Companies are in varying stages of dealing with the outbreak, but we’ve heard three common themes in how travel teams are approaching this unprecedented new reality.

COVID-19 (coronavirus) has impacted organizations around the globe, highlighting the critical need for actionable risk intelligence to help business continuity planning. Beyond the human toll, this epidemic is a wake-up call for companies to carefully review the strategies, policies, and procedures they have in place to protect employees, customers, and operations, in this and future epidemics.  

If your CEO or head of risk management walked into your office today and asked you how many employees recently traveled to China, and hence could be at risk for exposure to coronavirus, how confident are you of your answer?

The swift outbreak of the coronavirus across China and beyond has underscored how important it is for travel managers to have immediate, comprehensive access to data about their employees’ travel activity -- including bookings made directly with airlines, hotels, and other travel suppliers (or, “leakage”), which aren't visible via TMC reports. These blind spots in travel data present a serious duty of care risk for both companies and employees.

We frequently get questions from prospective clients regarding data privacy and security, and how Traxo's services meet legal requirements for both areas. For corporate travel managers seeking to understand their booking blindspots, we've compiled some of the most common questions and our responses, which can be shared with internal legal and IT teams.

The Traxo team was in New York City last week for the annual ACTE Global Summit and enjoyed the opportunity to connect with hundreds of corporate travel managers and buyers.  Our booth at InterACTE was busy nonstop! Thanks to all who stopped by to say hello -- we hope we helped shed some light on the challenges of managing your off-channel "leakage" spend, and how Traxo can alleviate this headache.  If you missed us at the booth, we'd still love to hear from you!

If we learned one thing from our numerous conversations, it's that leakage is a common problem for all corporate travel programs -- regardless of spend level, employee base, geography, mandate, or any of the travel management tools used.