New, industry-leading corporate travel t technologies are emerging all the time. We’ve also witnessed businesses reinventing themselves to stay relevant as the world changes around us. To continue future-proofing corporate travel programs, there are three key areas where travel managers should focus:
- Ensuring access to complete pre-trip travel data
- Crisis preparation and duty of care
(e.g., virus transmission tracking and natural disaster monitoring) - Leveraging automation for optimized travel management
Staying up-to-date with travel technology helps your organization remain competitive and relevant. Falling behind the times comes not only with higher booking costs and inefficient processes, but also an increased danger of not being able to support travelers in a crisis situation. Corporate travel technology has made it easier and more cost effective to book trips and has increased visibility into where travelers are, which can become extremely important for traveler safety when circumstances change in the country they are traveling within. Travel technology is about much more than saving on flight and hotel costs; it’s about taking good care of your people when they go out in the world to represent you.
Corporate Travel Technology #1 | Complete Travel Data
Access to complete trip data is more essential than ever before. Travel has been picking up recently, and it isn’t projected to slow down. Travel managers need to be extra vigilant in protecting their travelers' well-being by knowing their whereabouts and acting quickly should travel restrictions change. Travel technology solutions like Traxo can give you access to complete trip visibility – before, during, and after travel. With data available at your fingertips, you can easily and quickly locate your travelers, prioritize their health and safety while on the road, and provide post-trip support, if needed.
Thanks to this revolutionary data access, travel managers will be infinitely more confident in their ability to see all bookings from TMC and non-TMC sources and stop worrying about booking blindspots that lead to compromised duty of care.
Corporate Travel Technology #2 | Crisis Management and Duty of Care
Business travelers around the globe are always ready and eager to hit the tarmac. But, companies must leverage new travel management methods and technologies to ensure traveler safety. From monitoring viral outbreaks and natural disasters to terror attacks and civil unrest, business travel certainly comes with its share of risk. This has become abundantly clear over the past few years, and duty of care should be top of mind for every travel manager out there.
These technologies are designed to make it easy to track, locate, and even extract your business travelers should the need arise. The “need” in this case could be anything from a health risk to an injury. These solutions are your travelers’ lifelines, and that’s what makes updating and maintaining them important.
Travel Management Technology in the Real-World: International SOS COVID-19 Impact Map
To better understand and diminish potential risk, one of Traxo’s duty of care partners, International SOS, designed a COVID-19 Impact Map that provides businesses and travelers an opportunity to assess risk before embarking on a trip. The Impact Scale is designed to “take into account integrated health, security, and logistics considerations – three key factors in business sustainability during the pandemic.” This robust tool can assist travelers in determining their willingness to take certain trips and help companies decide where to resume/pause in-person business.
Corporate Travel Technology #3 | Automation
Artificial intelligence and machine learning have been making leaps and bounds in the travel industry and form the backbone of technologies commonly used in corporate travel programs today, such as TripBam and BTP Automation. The primary advantage of using automated systems for travel management is that it saves time. Without automation, your team has to manually keep track of changing rates and fees, which takes up time that they could be using to do more important tasks. With automated solutions, you can let the machines handle most of the “shopping” part of the process.
TripBam is a fully automated price assurance tool that provides you with a way to lower hotel costs and improve program compliance. “Traxo clients can automatically send their corporate hotel booking data to TRIPBAM for price monitoring.” TripBam offers both price monitoring and re-shopping of hotel rates; savings are found for more than 50% of bookings, resulting in direct savings back to your travel program.
BTP Automation is transforming the way businesses manage their hotel programs, all the while reducing client’s total hotel cost by an average of 14%. Leveraging AI to correct bookings in real-time saves you time and money, but it doesn’t stop there. Imagine a dynamic business tool that automates the hotel procurement process — renegotiating payment terms and conditions to keep up with changing market conditions throughout the year. BTP Automation does just that! It’s finally time to wave goodbye to the labor-intensive, annual hotel RFP process. Best of all, with Traxo’s integration, corrective actions can be taken on bookings before travel occurs to recoup savings and ensure policy compliance.
Leverage New Travel Management Technology as It Becomes Available
Future-proofing your travel program has never been easier with the robust technology platforms that exist in today’s marketplace. Travel technology solutions like Traxo’s can integrate with key industry partners to help organizations manage pre-trip data without prior training in data management or analysis; our solution is helpful to travel experts and newbies alike.
As a leading travel technology company, Traxo’s partnerships with industry-leading travel providers ensure that businesses have all the tools (and data!) needed to run a safe, efficient, and cost-effective corporate travel program; we specialize in building technology for travel managers. To learn more, contact us today.
