Looking at the Good on an Unhappy Anniversary

Everybody related to the global travel industry is commemorating a most unhappy anniversary. Depending on where in the world you are located, the first half of March likely marks one full year since your last travel event. Even if, like me, you have been lucky enough to travel a few times for private reasons, it remains the anniversary of the day our beloved industry went into hiatus and business travel became a distant memory.

Without going into a debate about all the things that went wrong or could have been handled better with the clarity of hindsight, I would like to outline some of the good things that emerged from the shutdown. After all, one of the golden rules in most industries is “never waste a good crisis.” Here we go:

Part 1: Sustainability Is a Clear Winner

Even before Covid-19 hit, we were seeing very clear signs of a rapid re-emergence of “sustainable travel” powered by flygskam, aka flight shame, the term coined in 2018 in Sweden that refers to the inherent guilt associated with the carbon emissions of flying. Looking at the overall status here in March 2021 there is no doubt we have entered a new phase where the concept of “unlimited cheap leisure travel” and “almost unlimited but more expensive corporate travel” has been replaced by a new mindset of “justifiable,” “purposeful,” “value driven” or “permissible” travel—all of them refer to the fact that we now have evidence of a meaningful alternative which is “not to travel” and therefore there will be a growing need to document why a given trip actually is necessary since it comes with a significant carbon emission cost for the environment.

It is still early days, and we are yet to see the actual rebound of travel happening, but it will be very interesting to see how corporate travel budgets will look in 2022 and beyond when the pandemic dust has settled and both government and company restrictions are lifted. Clearly, we need new technology to calculate the value of a trip based on the corporate framework and rules, and this is likely to appear in the form of new microservices designed and developed so they can be plugged into the existing travel program—both the online booking engines and the agent point of sales desktops

Furthermore, the core booking process will be merged with a clever mix of carbon emission awareness and optimization combined with new elements such as carbon budget management and sustainable air fuel blending rates—all designed to lower the number of trips or extend the average duration to get a higher return of investment for each travel event.

Hopefully this will lead the industry to a place where the first question asked about a corporate travel program is “what was your average carbon emission per travel day last year” rather than “what was your travel budget last year.”

Part 2: Virtual & Hybrid Meetings Will Evolve to Feel like a 'Real' Experience

It is fascinating to observe how much we have changed our behavior in relation to virtual meetings in just one year. We had spent 10 years getting used to (or trying to avoid) a very basic Cisco Webex service and never really liked it, but once Covid hit we immediately graduated to Zoom and within six months both Microsoft Teams and Cisco Webex had improved their products significantly in order to keep up with the Zoom revolution.

We now have integrated breakout rooms, live audience polling, easy recording, collaborative spaces and, most recently, behavior analytics as part of the virtual meeting space. Quite surprisingly, it has become default behavior to have the video camera enabled most of the time, which is something we never really did before Covid. It took an invisible virus to make us all visible in the virtual world.

More importantly, the next phase of virtual meetings has only just started. New technologies are moving in from the online gaming world, and they are enabling us to join meetings as an avatar and move around in a virtual space based either on a digital twin copy of a real world venue or a completely made up environment. No matter which of the two options you prefer, it is setting the scene for what will become the truly fascinating part of virtual meetings—the hybrid meeting!

The best way to describe how a hybrid meeting will work in the near future is to imagine that you are attending a real live event—say, the Business Travel Show in the London ExCel convention center. I, however, may decide to attend the same event virtually. In the future, we should still be able to sit down in the same breakout room and watch the same presentation in real time, while chatting directly via an event app which is capable of letting me know where you are at any point in time, as long as you have activated the sharing feature and allowed me access.

We might also go to a breakout area—say a café, bar or outside patio—and have a conversation with others using the same underlying communication technology. This will undoubtedly change the decision-making process around which events we will attend in person versus which ones we will attend virtually.

This new technology will probably make it more compelling to have real live events again. It will bring the most engaged audience to the in-person event, but at the same time it will enable a much larger audience to benefit virtually from the content being presented, and effectively provide the organizer with a larger set of eyeballs and, therefore, the ability to generate more sponsor income. Hybrid meetings become the perfect combo: reduced carbon footprint but more commercial value per delegate.

Part 3: We Can Fix the Automation Failures

One of the early surprises from the Covid fallout was that simple tasks like airline ticket refunds ended up taking many months of manual work to process. Even today many corporations are struggling with how to manage and use the significant unused airline ticket value now accumulated in a balance account without direct integration to new bookings.

This might seem like an unacceptable situation, but it simply highlights the fact that airlines have done an amazing job in enabling sales of their tickets via online and mobile platforms mostly by putting “work around” solutions on top of legacy systems. They never managed to do the same for the other areas of their business operation, however. As a result, when the Covid-19 crisis shut down travel, we were suddenly reminded about how inefficient and outdated airline operational back-office systems actually are—despite impressive daily operational performance with the physical movement of planes and passengers.

Furthermore, we have also seen how unprepared the industry was for capturing and using a few new digital data elements about the passenger. And now we need them badly—first, the Covid test result and now the Covid vaccination status. While this might seem strange, remember that most airlines and travel management companies still don’t even have a dedicated data element for storing the traveler's the mobile phone number. It typically resides in a random, free-text data element somewhere in the dark back-office basement. So it's not surprising that they are struggling with the decision of how to manage these new critical data elements.

Hopefully, one of the outcomes from Covid will be an accelerated deployment of IATA’s One Order standard, which at least is designed to manage an unlimited number of data elements as structured data rather than random free text. There is still hope for One Order in the travel world, after all, and perhaps it will be one of the surprising winners from the Covid-19 hit—or perhaps an alternative open data exchange will overtake it. 

TMCs and airlines weren't the only ones confronted with automation failures in the aftermath of Covid-19. Travel managers themselves are grappling with the same—they continue to spend endless hours in Excel trying to consolidate or normalize different data sets. We've seen how unacceptable this is in a crisis, but ultimately in 2021 it should be unacceptable as an operational reality. We should let software do this kind of work for us in tasks ranging from hotel rates audits and airfare validation against market rates to calculating carbon emissions from travel or creating and submitting expense reports. Even the time-consuming process of researching meetings locations—when that business recovers—can now be largely automated with modern cloud-based services capable of capturing, processing and analyzing the right data instantly.

As travel program managers look at their suppliers for data and automation improvements, they should be looking at internal inefficiencies as well. If a travel program requires more than one hour per week doing manual data entry or Excel based modeling, the company is either using the wrong travel service provider or needs to upgrade its internal tech stack very quickly to avoid becoming obsolete.

Part 4: Microservices Poised to be the Next Big Thing If Buyers Take Control of their Data

Covid-19 has shown us that we need to collaborate more at a faster pace, and hopefully this is one of the big lessons learned as we start looking at growth in the travel industry again. No system should be operating with a closed data mindset, but obviously we still need to apply maximum data privacy and security principles across all steps and systems.

The only way to achieve this at scale is to create open easy to use interfaces (APIs) capable of exchanging relevant information in real-time (no more batch jobs please) with fully integrated error handling and messaging features designed to provide the traveler with a seamless journey and experience.

The travel industry, however, is still full of players who either don’t want to—or don’t understand why they need to—provide access to their data as long as the customer represented by the data gives the permission for the data to be used.

As we move forward, I sincerely hope corporate travel buyers will step up and realize that “you are the owner of the data” involved in servicing you, and therefore you should decide how these data can be used to provide better and smarter services through other systems and solutions (mostly provided by startups) which are developed with an open data mindset.

The benefits are massive for the travel buyer. Imagine if you could launch a new travel related service in a few days on a global basis rather than being told it will take six to 12 months to get a few countries launched. Your job is to provide the travelers with the best possible travel program and experience, and that is not likely to happen when your primary partners constantly decline to support new projects and services because their data infrastructure is outdated or because they consider the new service a threat to their own revenue.

After being involved in corporate travel for more than 20 years, I find it fascinating when a global travel buyer spending millions of dollars annually on travel says, "my TMC will not let me use my own data for a new service." It still happens, and a few TMCs are literally refusing to even talk about the concept of a letting a startup access their booking data. That's quite an amazing position to take in a world based on delivering excellent customer service and value.

Part 5: Blockchain a Clear Solution for New Travel Reality

The final observation after one year of travel absence is that the time has come for blockchain to shine in the travel industry. I believe this will happen in a number of ways, ranging from the handling of Covid vaccination data to new loyalty programs, smart contract engines for procurement to payment and settlement with crypto tokens designed for the travel industry. And, yes, we are already seeing the first elements of these solutions emerge.

My personal view is that I don’t trust any government or travel supplier to manage my personal medical data. I would prefer to have a blockchain-based version of my information with a digital key I control—and I am the only one who can give the key to relevant service providers when I travel. That could be an airline, an airport security entity or a hotel, but once my trip has ended, I revoke the key and my data are private and secure again until my next trip. Nobody will have locally stored version of my health information in a database without my acknowledgement. And the same goes for my preference data. 

When I travel in the future, I want relevant services to appear magically in my hand (on my mobile device) based on the trip I am taking and on my preferences. Even with my preference data, I want to control who can reach me and for how long they are able to do so, and blockchain is the solution for that if privacy and personal control are also paramount. I truly believe we will see solutions designed to make this a reality within a few years. Once they emerge, it will be the end of the current model where my personal travel data is stored without my consent.

One of the most exciting areas of opportunity for blockchain in travel is the distribution of and payment for content and services. Despite the constant claims of the naysayers, we are now approaching a point where blockchain technology can scale to handle the same volume of transactions per second as the most powerful legacy mainframe servers, so Moore’s law has delivered once again.

With speed of transaction no longer a concern, we will see new distribution and payment solutions emerge with ultra-low-cost models, and most likely the law of disruption will result in a dramatic reduction of the power current legacy players have used to control the industry for 20 to 30 years. 

In the travel galaxy—just around the blockchain corner—it will be possible for me to book and ticket and pay via a smart contract that releases the digital asset the minute after the plane leaves the gate. In other words, I pay the airline when they start moving me from A to B, not when I make a booking three months in advance, unless I select that payment option.

For those of you who think this is crazy talk, just remember how the world felt about Netflix, Ryanair, Google and Amazon to name a few examples of unstoppable innovation. If the value offered by the new service is compelling enough, the customer will change behavior regardless of how much the incumbent player tries to prevent change. There is no reason to believe this logic doesn’t apply in the travel industry.

The Travel Future is Bright

As we enter year two in the Covid era, I am confident we are about to enter a phase where the level of innovation within the global travel industry will reach heights we have never seen before. Given the fact that volumes probably will remain low for a while, there is a really good chance of participating in the change process. Don’t be the person with the head in the sand waiting for the storm to blow over. Stand up and share your opinion about what changes you would like to see in the future because this is your best chance ever to make it happen.

My fellow Dane Hans Christian Andersen once said, “to travel is to live.” Soon we will all be traveling again in a smarter, better, faster and greener way. Happy travels to you all!

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Editor's Note: This concludes a week of outlook contributions from our friend Johnny Thorsen. Email [email protected] to tell BTN about your business travel silver lining.