In the pre-digital world, a profile was, and still is, an
unstructured block of text that travel management companies retain within their
global distribution system. The text amounts to a repository of repeatedly used
details about the traveler to make the booking process faster, such as payment
card numbers, frequent flyer IDs and passport information. On top is a policy
layer, outlining, for example, the cabin in which the traveler is allowed to
fly.
The Road Ahead or a Cul-de-Sac?
A new generation of digital profile management systems can
potentially absorb much more information to understand travelers based on their
previous booking (and even search) behavior and a detailed, structured record of
their preferences.
Where opinion starts to diverge is on the merit of such an
idea. Enthusiasts paint a picture of technology staying one step ahead of
travelers to anticipate their needs and keep them happy, safe and compliant
throughout the pre-trip and on-trip process. Sceptics see little relevance to
business (as opposed to leisure) travel and cast doubt on whether
profile-driven personalization will ever materialize in practice.
“For business travel I don’t think anyone really cares
whether or not the business traveler likes long walks on the beach or prefers
red wine or white,” said David Wood, CEO of Trondent Development Corp, a vendor
of GDS-independent profile management systems to TMCs. “Those are things you
care more about on a consumer-based trip where you are planning a nice vacation
for somebody. For a business trip, you only want some degree of
personalization, like ‘I want a king-sized bed and an economy car and a
no-smoking room and an aisle.’ Those types of things are pretty standard.
“TMC call centers just want to get people off the phone as
quickly as they can so they can go on to the next one and they’re not going to
ask about any of the touchy-feely stuff,” said Wood.
Others see more potential, including Katharina Navarro,
global category manager for travel and meetings at Capgemini. She entertains a
vision of artificial intelligence “that augments elements in your profile so
that it starts to understand you go to Paris every week where you always like
to stay in this one hotel. It learns as it goes and combines the profile of
what you like with the policy of what you should be booking to give a perfect
match.”
According to Will Pinnell, vice president, product for BCD
Travel, this is starting to happen. “Newer technology is no longer relegated to
the traditional and static fields that are prepopulated in a reservation system
or sent from an HR feed by the corporation,” he said. “These new profile
systems increasingly contain personal information, including Facebook, Twitter
or Instagram handles. Tying multiple systems together is the signature of
next-generation profile systems.
“These new profiles learn based on a traveler’s behavior and
over time can create personas of individuals based on a set of collective
attributes or behavior. Personas could include airline or hotel loyalist, road
warrior, upgrade investigator, service-often-required, new to the company, and
so on.”
What Profile-Driven Personalized Looks Like
David Chappell, UK country director for the travel
technology provider Midoco, imagines perfect personalization of a London-New
York journey. The traveler is guided by a mobile app that is powered by a
profile management system connected via application programming interfaces to
numerous other information sources and service tools.
The process starts with a traveler booking a flight online
and then being messaged a week later to ask them, since they haven’t yet booked
a hotel, if they would like a reservation to be made at the same property they
stayed in last time.
On the morning of the outbound flight, the system checks
Google to assess traffic between the traveler’s home address and airport. “If it’s busy, I can send a message to say
‘you might consider a different route,’ or even better, if the app is
geolocated, I can see the they are still at home and that traffic means they
are going to be late, so I can send a message to say, ‘You really need to think
about getting on your way, otherwise we might need to change your flight; would
you like us to do that for you if you are delayed?’” said Chappell.
At Heathrow airport, an API connection from flight-tracking
service FlightGlobal informs the traveller their flight has been delayed. The
app knows that last time this happened, the traveler bought time at a departure
lounge, so they are pinged a message offering the opportunity to book lounge
space again for £30.
On landing at Kennedy, the traveler is alerted that their
taxi has been rebooked and the hotel informed of their late arrival. On arrival
at the hotel, another message reminds the traveler they must show their virtual
card number on which everything will be paid. Meanwhile, the app has already
connected through an API to the traveler’s Facebook profile which reveals they
like fish restaurants. A message is sent offering to book a famous fish
restaurant around the corner from the hotel. “’Also, we tell them one of their
colleagues is in New York, because we have their profile as well,” said
Chappell. “We ask ‘Would you like to go to dinner together?’”
Could, and Should, Business Travel Be “Amazonized”
“Every single piece of that technology I’ve just described
exists today,” said Chappell. “However, no one has hooked it all together.
There are people who offer bits of it. The logical concepts behind that and the
ability to remove the false positives [that would create irrelevant alerts]
from all the triggers would be insanely complex.
“I think we are many years from that kind of journey,”
Chappell continued. “However, large aggregators like Amazon are getting pretty
good at offering just relevant stuff. Jeff Bezos’ single biggest breakthrough
was to see just how predictable people are based on data, so I think in time
that kind of environment will come.”
But it is precisely the comparison with Amazon that places
Guy Snelgar, senior vice president for global travel technology integration
with Partnership Travel Consulting, in the sceptics’ camp on this issue. “We
have been talking about personalization for 10 years,” he said. “I have not
seen anyone usefully apply that, and not just in travel. I bought a Disney
Princess play castle on Amazon for my niece four years ago and every month
Amazon still sends similar product recommendations to me. If Amazon can’t do it
very well, I’m not sure that expecting companies that service business
travelers to do it is realistic.”
Snelgar said basic profile-driven personalization, for
example to display details of past choices when booking repeat visits to a
destination, does have value. “A digital version could add to that, but we’ve
plateaued out,” he said. “There’s still work to be done to make the most of
what’s already there.”
Chappell agrees. “Saying ‘this is where you stayed when you
went to New York last time’ may sound like a really simple concept but in a lot
of TMCs that’s quite tricky,” he said. “A lot of people are striving to make it
happen, but travel is a very low-margin industry and change costs money. If you
haven’t got a lot of money, you’re not going to change unless your customer
really demands it.”
Covid has depleted the margins of corporate travel
businesses even further, and the pandemic has also set back profile-driven
personalization in a direct yet perhaps overlooked way. “Personalization by
TMCs requires scale, and scale requires volume of transactions,” said BCD’s
Pinnell. “Unfortunately, given the impact of Covid, past travel behavior and
activity aren’t necessarily predictors of future travel [anymore]. Travel
patterns and policies are going to shift dramatically over the next several
years. As more people work from home, as more offices close and as more
meetings are conducted virtually, we’ll establish a new baseline for
travel. We’ll need to uncover this new
normal before systems can begin to predict and personalize the business
traveler’s experience.”
Signs of progress
In spite of these diverse challenges, there are signs that
profile-driven personalization is moving forward. UK-based startup Grapevine
won innovation awards at BTN Group events in both New York and London in
October 2021. CEO Jack Dow said Grapevine enables TMCs to offer travelers
hotels based on an amalgam of live trip, historical, profile and company policy
data, including “where they or their colleagues have stayed before or the kind
of hotel they like or people like them like.”
Grapevine is in the process of adding personalized airport
services, including parking, transfers and lounge and fast-track security
access, with a plan to expand to offering bookings for relevant restaurants in
2022.
Dow said advanced data structuring and machine learning are
helping the cause and believes profile-driven personalization has the potential
to perform better in a business travel context than elsewhere.
“One of the big reasons we decided to focus on business
travel rather than leisure is intent,” he said. “We know why someone is going
somewhere and when, and we know that if they haven’t booked a hotel yet they
have to stay somewhere. We know that if they are going to an airport, a high
percentage will want airport parking. We know that if a plane is delayed they
might want lounge access through to in-destination restaurants near their
hotel. Rather than Amazon, which is essentially trying to find ways to get you
to buy something, our service is discrete. We’re trying to offer you things you
might like within the context of your trip. We’re not an upsell machine.”
If travel managers want more profile-driven personalization,
however, they may have to express their feelings a little louder. According to
Trondent’s Wood, the issue has not been a “squeaky wheel” requirement that
demands action by corporate travel service providers. Navarro is an embodiment
of this observation. “Could profile management be better?” she asked. “Yes, but
it’s visionary and strategic.”
While it may not require an immediate fix, personalization
through profile remains a promise she’s looking to the industry to deliver.
“It’s probably something more in the three- to five-year plan.”