Understanding the Pandemic-Era Business Traveler

The Covid-19 pandemic has baked more scrutiny but also more purpose into the decision to travel for business. The shift to remote work, which catapulted brick-and-mortar offices into the future in a too-quick-for-comfort scramble, has now become the preferred environment for a majority of the knowledge-based workforce, according to professional network Blind. Most only want to visit the office intermittently to power up their work relationships and dive deeper into collaboration projects. According to EY, only 20 percent have interest in returning to the office full time. Indeed, no matter where you look, worker surveys show overwhelming preferences for flexible work arrangements and employees demanding to work more on their own terms.

The focus on how we work and not where we work has enveloped business travel as well. Is it necessary to travel to meet that client? Is there a return on investment for that conference or trade show? Can in-person training now be reasonably achieved through video-enabled online learning? On the flip side, however, do we need to enable more internal meetings so our now-geographically-distributed workforce can come together to engage with and understand our unique corporate culture?

All these questions put a laser focus on the fact that travel in the context of business is a means to an end—a tool or an enabler that allows businesses to get the job done. Now, however, the decision to hop on a plane may not be as straightforward. There are viable alternatives available at our fingertips and plenty of reasons to stay put: traveler health concerns, productivity, sustainability, work-life balance, mental well-being. They all play a part in the decision-making process, and in many cases are deeply personal to the employee. So how does this affect travel management? 

What Travelers Want

Before we look at what employee travelers want, let’s look at what they have: power.

EY’s 2021 Work Reimagined survey showed that 54 percent of workers would quit their jobs if the company was not flexible in meeting their personal or work-life needs. Caught in a lingering pandemic environment and swept into a social-industrial phenomenon recently dubbed “The Great Resignation,” companies have shown more deference to worker preferences and needs, and travel programs are no exception.

“Traveler preferences have definitely taken precedence over compliance with our preferred suppliers,” said Yukari Tortorich, global travel VP for Discovery, where employees have returned to some levels of travel and travel requests are increasing on the daily. Speaking on a panel at the BTN Group’s recent Innovate conference in New York, the veteran travel manager said she was considering ways to ease travelers back into the idea of stricter supplier compliance as travel returns in earnest for the mass media company. For now, travelers still have latitude to book with suppliers that meet sometimes intangible personal preferences.

Tortorich isn’t alone in this challenge to re-establish a more traditional travel guidance for Discovery’s program. In a June 2021 SAP Concur survey of travel managers, 99 percent of 700 respondents said their jobs would be harder over the next 12 months. Not only are they grappling with communicating revised travel policies and dealing with new border regulations and health concerns, they also will be faced with changing traveler expectations of what corporate travel programs should provide.

A June SAP Concur survey of more than 3,000 business travelers found the vast majority—72 percent—of managed business travelers expected their travel programs now to offer them flexibility to choose alternative airlines, hotels and transportation providers to fit their needs. For significant percentages of respondents, that meant the latitude to book direct flights (52 percent), four- and five-star hotels (39 percent) or premium cabin seating on airlines (also 39 percent).

In a more recent Concur survey of 1,070 corporate travelers conducted in October, the top three concerns when booking travel were Covid-19 infection rates in the target destination, Covid-19 vaccination rates in the target destination and how eco-friendly travelers could make their trip. This survey also revealed that trip cost was business travelers’ second-to-last priority in traveling post-pandemic.

Aligning with those expectations would be a topsy-turvy reversal of recent objectives for most travel managers, who have been rewarded for at least the last decade for being highly procurement oriented and for their ability to deliver year-over-year savings. Judging from recent comments from the likes of Tortorich and other big travel buyers, however, trip cost can no longer be the determinate factor when booking business travel.

“The biggest challenge and the biggest change in this environment has been… less of a focus on how much does the trip cost and more of a focus on, is the travel safe, is there an ROI?” ServiceNow travel manager Heather Allegrina said during a recent Concur Fusion panel.

But other traveler preferences like sustainability, booking with diverse suppliers and getting choosier about types of transport or class of service choices aren’t out of the picture. 

Balancing Policy & Traveler Preference

BTN’s Corporate Travel 100 research revealed policy trends among some of the industry’s most sophisticated travel programs. A preference for direct flights, despite higher costs, has been one point of change for many programs, given the motivation to reduce travel touchpoints and health exposures for the traveler. Direct flights also mitigate the intensive carbon emissions of participating in a second plane take-off. Other policy changes travel managers have shared with BTN surround the number of hours travelers may spend reaching a business travel destination via rental car or personal car. The duration of acceptable vehicle journey time has increased for people who prefer to drive rather than fly—and car rental providers’ revenues are loving it.

BTN’s 2021 hotel survey revealed 35 percent of travel managers have seen a shift in hotel bookings toward upscale properties since 2019 and 31 percent have seen a shift to upper-upscale properties—whether their policies technically allow for it or not.

A number of CT100 companies have either considered or already implemented more permissive travel policies around premium air cabins. One travel manager, on condition of anonymity, revealed he was considering an all-business class air policy. On the one hand, he said, the move would address traveler expectations in terms of perceptions of service and duty of care; on the other hand, and more strategically, he believes it would motivate every would-be traveler and direct manager to scrutinize the value and ROI of each trip against the budget impact. “I don’t know if we could do it,” he said, “but I’m starting to think it might be a good idea.”

Moving forward, this is the kind of strategic balancing act travel managers will need to play as employees get back on the road in a tight labor market, where employees preference has more influence than ever.

SAP Concur, for one, is so convinced companies will double down on employee experience—in all matters, including travel and expense—that the T&E technology giant has rolled out a sentiment analysis platform in collaboration with Qualtrics to measure traveler reaction at scale and support data-based decision-making around how T&E policy and program changes affect employees. 

“People are a company’s greatest asset, and it’s no secret that retaining employees has become even more critical,” said SAP Concur solution area lead Mike Koetting,  “A company’s travel and expense programs can directly impact an employee’s experience.”

Go Deeper than Policy to Gain Traveler Trust

T&E policy adjustments aren’t the only response to meeting travelers’ post-Covid expectations—even if they seem like the most straightforward. Looking more deeply into traveler motivations for flexibility and increased service levels, some travel managers are asking themselves what travelers are really seeking.

The most succinct answer may be “trust” or “support” or “a sense of control” over their journey. Simply changing a company’s rules around class of service or preferred suppliers may fall short on that count.

Takeda Pharmaceutical global head of travel Michelle DeCosta is taking a different approach to transform the business travel experience for her travelers. “It’s all about visibility—and making sure support teams are constantly visible to travelers,” she said.

To that end, DeCosta has enlisted the help of mobile travel technology platform Roadmap to offer information, access and a sense of control for travelers as they get back on the road en masse. While Takeda continued to travel at reduced volumes through the pandemic, by summer it was up to about 20 percent of its 2019 total and it continues to scale, though DeCosta predicts the company won’t go back to pre-pandemic travel levels.

Even at these lower numbers, Takeda travelers were challenged by border entry requirements, different cultural acceptance for masking and precautions and the general alterations of business travel during the Covid-era.

“Our suppliers have been doing a lot of handholding [for our business travelers]. As travel ramps up, they won’t be able to do that, at least not to that degree,” DeCosta said, noting that Takeda travelers have voiced huge accolades for the company’s travel partners stepping up during Covid-19.

DeCosta believes companies need to take over more of that confidence-building responsibility themselves by reducing trip friction points and staying present with travelers throughout the journey. “We want to have a one stop shop so travelers have an elevated, simplified experience” that only the managed program can provide, she said.

“The Roadmap app for us is designed to be more than itinerary management,” said DeCosta, referring to platforms that send reminders about in-trip events like flight times, estimated travel time duration and meeting times and locations. Roadmap can do all that, but it functions for Takeda as an app integrator that holds booking apps, supplier apps, government-required apps and also points travelers to updated external resources for detailed information like country entrance requirements that are likely to remain tricky as international travel rates increase.

“We want to take all that intelligence and either integrate it into this app or [allow the traveler] to push a button to get to our global security operations center [for] support,” or to whatever resource they need, DeCosta said.

Building a Path Back to Personalization

Understanding the traveler at the point of booking or when situations arise along the journey has been an aspirational objective for travel management for a long time. Travel managers traditionally relied on agents in both circumstances to support traveler decision-making and provide solutions. In the age of Amazon and Netflix, however, when machine learning and artificial intelligence has permeated so many parts of our collective consumer life, business travelers have come to expect the same functionality in employee systems, including travel platforms.

Managed travel has seen progress with travel booking systems—both new and not-so-new—crunching data an applying algorithms to offer tailored travel itineraries based on historical bookings and the bookings of other similar travelers. This “persona-based” technology—and even travel policies tailored to different traveler personas within a company—was a concept that was gaining real traction for managed travel before the great shutdown in 2020. But while Netflix and Amazon data went through the roof as would-be business travelers stayed home ordering groceries and binge-watching their favorite shows, travel data evaporated into thin air.

Microsoft global travel lead Eric Bailey, who pioneered a travel program around traveler personas, told BTN last month, not much of that data is relevant now.

“Everyone has changed, the whole world has changed,” he said. And systems like machine learning that rely on vast data tranches largely must start over with new post-pandemic data. That strategy could take a while to emerge if business travel ramps up gradually. At its foundation, we all know AI is a volume play. That’s the reason the machine learning players pivoted to business travel in the first place.

GoldSpring Consulting partner Will Tate agreed with Bailey’s assessment but went further. “Covid completely stalled what we think of as true personalization. If they continued to travel, most companies were forced to revert from enhancing the traveler experience to command and control, with pre-trip approval, reuse of unused tickets and hopefully failsafe measures for health and safety,” he said.

It’s clear, however, that personalization will be an important part of serving newly empowered travel populations looking for enhanced program features. The question is—how? 

Thankfully, innovation didn’t stop during the pandemic. Technology will remain a central player, but new strategies may rely less on a traveler’s historic patterns and more on what we know is happening around them en route or in the destination market.

U.K.-based TMC Gray Dawes is using Grapevine’s AI technology to help deliver personalised travel options for travelers using its YourTrip OBT. This can include hotel, car hire and other traditional ancillaries but will eventually encompass other areas such as restaurant and live event bookings.

Gray Dawes’ chief technology officer Steve Fisher said: “Client data is ingested from multiple sources, including historical bookings, live trip information and company policies to get a clear understanding of each traveler and how we can help.”

Gray Dawes' chief commercial officer said the aim is to make sure offers are contextual, delivered at the right time and in an appropriate channel. Machine learning is vital here to undertake processes at scale and more importantly, to offer these consistently. “If we can anticipate what a traveler wants, deliver it at the right time and make the booking process super simple, then we’ve done what we set out: more margin to the TMC and more value to the traveler and corporate.”

DeCosta said the industry is more willing to collaborate than ever on these kinds of innovations. “[We’re] in discussions with a number of key suppliers to personalize and potentially message around the choices travelers make,” she said. Roadmap already has added personalized sustainability-related messaging to Takeda’s version of the app, and DeCosta noted that other travel partners are eager to align with these types of personalization initiatives to drive traveler engagement.

—Mark Frary and Adam Perrotta contributed reporting to this article