For corporate travel buyers negotiating airline agreements, savings
remain the top priority by a wide margin, although most buyers also expect
travelers' comfort to play a bigger role in agreements in the coming years, according
to a survey conducted by the Association of Corporate Travel Executives.
Of 212 corporate travel managers around the world surveyed
in July, 87 percent said discounts drive their current airline agreements.
Nearly 40 percent said reduced prices for ancillaries are key. Only 26 percent
said traveler comfort packages were critical.
Similarly, fewer than half of buyers used traveler-centric key
performance indicators like upgrades and traveler satisfaction to evaluate
agreements. The most popular metric in the survey was the net effect of
discount rates, used by 74 percent of travel managers.
Still, there are signs of a shift
to focus on traveler experience, though not at the expense of savings.
"To be brutally frank, we don't factor in service today as one of the main
decision parameters—it is almost all on price—but that might change next year
due to a possible update in travel policy," a European travel buyer said
in the survey.
Fifty-six percent of buyers said traveler
comfort would become more important in the next two years. As a priority, that
ranked behind discounts (74 percent) and reduced prices for ancillaries (64
percent).