Advito Adds Tech Tool Management to Its Offerings

Advito, the consulting practice owned by BCD Travel, is launching a global practice group called Demand and Behavior Management that rolls up its Total Collaboration Management practice and traveler engagement services but also will add two new angles: helping clients optimize the management tools they already use and curating new tools.

Total Collaboration Management, an existing partnership with Cisco, helps travel programs manage demand by encouraging use of alternatives to business trips—i.e., Cisco's virtual and cloud-based meetings technology. Adding to that partnership, Advito will boost the Cisco Advanced Services group's adoption consulting by providing analytics on how well each Total Collaboration Management client is driving its employees to choose Cisco's virtual collaboration options over trips.

Then there's Advito's traveler engagement service, which deals with both demand from travelers and traveler behavior; Advito managing director and BCD Travel SVP April Bridgeman describes it as "trying to get travelers to make better purchasing decisions on their own behalf but also on behalf of the company."

Those are the legacy Advito services. Filling out the new umbrella practice are two services that deal with the third-party tools Advito clients use. "There are constantly new capabilities coming online, and I would actually suggest that most managed travel programs aren't even using the capabilities they have today to manage demand and behavior in a sophisticated way," said Bridgeman.

Advito will "work with our customers to make sure that everything their travelers interact with is most effectively configured to drive the best decisions," she said. Example: Some booking tools allow travel managers to control how search results appear to travelers. Has the travel manager blocked squatter rates, which would save money on audits and push the travel program's preferred properties to the top of the search results, Bridgeman noted. The point is to make existing tools more powerful, she said. "It's hard to keep up with all the different things that tools can do, right? Especially in many of our multinational and global programs, they have many tools that they're using across their programs."

Last, the new practice will sift through the new third-party tools coming out so travel programs can use behavioral economics theory, as retailers do, to influence what people buy. "We should be doing it in travel, as well, and it's something we started talking about—I don't know—four or five years ago at GBTA."

About Those New Tools

How will Advito present to its clients the tools it thinks are worthy? "We will go anywhere from recommending to reselling to implementing to then helping clients figure out how to leverage new configuration opportunities to drive better behavior," Bridgeman said. "There will be more and more tools that will enable companies to leverage different aspects of shopping results displays to use tactics like the "power of free" or anchor pricing. Then we would want to make sure our clients understand … what impact they can have and work with them to actually configure the tools." Advito is close to a reselling partnership with one new tool, she said.

Advito also plans to bring to market this year a tool that will help travelers determine, at the time of booking, whether to travel for an internal meeting or conduct a virtual meeting. Online booking tools offer only basic capabilities to explore alternatives to travel, Bridgeman said, but the new tool will combine the shopping/booking environment for travel and the asset/inventory management system for videoconferencing. It will offer not only an approximate cost for a meeting held at a company location but also the feasibility of virtual collaboration, noting, for example, which attendees have videconferencing setups at their locations.