There are many things smartphones do well, but making a
corporate travel reservation is not one of them. Corporate travelers can use a
mobile phone as a boarding pass, a hotel room key, a flight alert system and an
itinerary management tool. Smartphones tell road warriors if their flight is
canceled or, conversely, what gate to head to for an on-time departure.
However, the linchpin of the corporate travel lifecycle—the booking—remains
largely out of the realm of mobile devices, due in part to the complexity of
translating a corporate reservation onto a three-by-two-inch screen, among
other complicating factors.
Still, tech suppliers say reservations are in the next wave
of mobile-enabled functionality for corporate travel, with some booking tool
providers hoping to transform mobile phones from information delivery devices
to transactional platforms.
Also see: Travel Apps Most Apt
"Mobile technology gives travelers information they
need on the road. That's what it does well," said Android-toting senior
director of information systems and travel buyer at The Advisory Board Co.
Steven Mandelbaum. "It does well in the logistics of travel once it's
booked. Everything from the gate alerts to getting your itinerary, mobile
technology works exceptionally well. It's well-baked, it's been out for a
while, travelers use it, adoption is high on it and they like it."
Where mobile technology lags in the corporate travel space,
buyers and suppliers acknowledged, is in the realm of transacting. Several tech
suppliers, now turning their eyes to solving the transaction equation, said
itinerary management and travel information—where mobile functionality has been
most prevalent—has been merely the starting point.
Also see: Mobility's Fallibilities
"There are a lot of products that provide information.
That's the lowest-hanging fruit in terms of what a traveler might need or want,"
Sabre Holdings director of mobile strategy Will Pinnell said.
Concur executive vice president of worldwide marketing Mike
Hilton added, "The most common functionality and the first to be adopted
is the basic itinerary viewing and management. I don't have to print out an
e-mail or pull out a piece of paper to see where I'm going. That's the baseline
where we are today. I think where itinerary management gets extended, and where
you start to see differences from all the providers, is in what kind of
services you can hang off of the itinerary."
Mandelbaum, a Rearden Mobile Personal Assistant client,
noted the breadth of mobile-delivered information, claiming it is relevant,
timely, and itinerary- and location-specific. It's not static information that
travelers have to grab, but dynamic information that is pushed out when
travelers most need it, Rearden Commerce's Tony D'Astolfo added.
"Users love getting that little ‘ding' that says they
have a message," D'Astolfo said. "They click on the message and see
that their gate has changed, that their flight's been delayed or that their
flight's on time and here's the gate. They love that somebody is pushing that
to them."
The needs of smartphone-wielding travelers continue to
evolve, as does the functionality offered by suppliers. Looking back a year,
Sabre released a survey in November 2009 of 800 corporate and leisure travelers
across the globe, finding that the most popular uses of mobile tech in the
corporate travel space were informational: 72 percent adopted flight
notification services, 68 percent used mobile devices for checking the weather,
67 percent used phones to view hotel locations and 64 percent using them as
destination guides while on the ground.
"Most of the uses on the list," Pinnell said of
that survey, "are information-based. There weren't a lot of transactions,"
he said. "I think you'll see a shift as we conduct the survey again,
probably early next year. You'll start to see the ability to purchase
ancillaries and the ability to not just book a segment, but add to an existing
segment, which is probably the more frequent use-case scenario on a mobile
device."
Corporate travel technology providers, including Concur,
Rearden and Sabre, all agreed that they plan to expand mobile functionality
into transactions. "Especially at Sabre, we are a global distribution
system, and we're all about transactions. We have to enable that," said
Pinnell. "That's our business and, regardless of where that transaction
happens—through the Sabre Red workspace, through GetThere, through the
agency—we have a variety of ways to do that, and mobile is just another
channel."
Noting that Concur already counts some limited successes in
enabling transactions through mobile phones, including booking rail through
direct connects or booking a taxi through a partnership with Taxi Magic, Hilton
said, "We think there will be a day—and it's certainly our intent from an
R&D perspective—to enable full travel transacting on the smartphone. We
think smartphones are able to do that: to actually book an air trip, even
complex air trips. We think full transacting for all travel transactions is
something that should work on a smartphone, and we're not too far away from
being able to do that."
Fully enabling transactions also is a goal for Rearden, but
vice president of products Mike Uomoto said the ability to amend bookings in
instances of service disruptions would be quicker to market. "In the early
2011 timeframe, we're going to be bringing out certain areas where our users
have told us mobile is most important: I'm running late or there's a storm or
my flight got canceled, so what are my options that are within policy? We want
to show them all the options and find a quick way to get rebooked on the best
option for the traveler and the company. Maybe in a year or two, everybody is
going to be doing their booking, but in 2011, I think we're going to be looking
at the use cases that are going to provide the most value to the user."
President of Travel Tech Consulting Norm Rose agreed that
such uses are far more valuable to the corporate traveler than originating a
booking on a phone. "Focusing on the booking element, particularly air
bookings, is a little misguided," he said. "The value of the mobile
platform for the corporate traveler when it comes to booking is rebooking in
the event of some type of change in itinerary or irregular operation."
Still, delivering the Holy Grail of full booking
functionality is a difficult proposition, considering the complexity of policy
and the tiny screen of a smartphone. "These devices are not exceptional
decision support systems," Mandelbaum said of mobile devices. "Corporate
booking tools are more than order takers. They are guiders of policy. There is
a certain complexity added to the process when you have that, and it is far
more complex than the normal Travelocity or Orbitz, because you have to guide
travelers by policy. That would need to be well baked into any of these tools."
Among barriers to delivery, all of the tech suppliers
speaking with BTN said they are limited by the real estate on a small
smartphone screen, making booking transactions a hard code to crack. "What
you can't do is take a web browser screen and just shrink it down to an iPhone
or an Android or BlackBerry and that's your mobile booking experience,"
Hilton said. "That's not what travelers want. You have to be really
thoughtful, and there are a lot of customer experiences and user design
considerations. It's a big investment. It's not trivial."
Illustrating the display problem that bookings would face in
a mobile environment, Rearden's D'Astolfo said, "Here's a response when I
ask the Rearden Personal Assistant desktop version: I just want to fly from
LaGuardia to Chicago and there are 91 preferred, in-policy options. There are
seven airports that the system considered—five airports in the New York area,
including White Plains and Islip, and then another two on the Chicago side,
Midway and O'Hare. I have an unused ticket on two of the carriers, so now the
company wants me to use my unused ticket and American is preferred—all of that
needs to be presented in a small, mobile footprint. You have to find a way to
give the user the six or seven most relevant options that you can elegantly
display."
Another complicating factor to transacting on smartphones,
according to Sabre's Pinnell, is security and privacy concerns. "When you
start dealing with transactions, not just here in the United States but parts
of Europe, those constraints are even tighter," he said. "It becomes
complicated."
Despite the complications, tech suppliers continue work to
transform the mobile experience for travelers. "From our perspective, we
believe that mobile technology is a sea change," Hilton said. "It's a
paradigm shift. We believe that it's probably not too many years from now when
we're going to see most of our travelers' transactions with Concur happening
via smartphones versus a browser. We think it's that big of a change."
This report originally
appeared in the Oct. 25, 2010, issue of Business Travel News.