Personalization. It’s a term that’s been getting a lot of buzz in the managed travel industry lately, but what it means, what it looks like and how sophisticated it should be when deployed in a managed travel program can differ based on who’s answering those questions.
For some, personalization is an extension of hospitality. It’s a white-glove service that recognizes road warriors and ensures they’re treated well by suppliers and corporate travel agents. For others, personalization is all about choice and making business travel resemble non-business travel from end-to-end.
“Personalization is primarily about the experience. It’s how you book and experience travel,” said Sean-Michael Callahan, director of global travel, meetings and events at Hewlett Packard Enterprises. “I want to lead the expectations from the leisure space into our traveler space.
The two perspectives on personalization can seem incongruous on their surface. After all, one is a longtime principle of the business; the other relies on new tools and forward thinking. But both get to the same idea: travel is about the traveler.
In today’s managed travel program, it’s impossible to make travel about the traveler without embracing data and new technology.
Personalization in a Nutshell
Those confused about what exactly personalization resembles today on the consumer side need search no farther than the websites and applications they’re already using. Amazon, Google, Netflix…they each know who you are, where you are, and what you like.
While these sites are great for the general public, they condition individuals to expect the same level of recognition and ease in every area of their lives, and that can be tricky to provide in a managed travel program.
“At the end of the day, we serve a corporate client, and it’s our job to figure out how we can deliver a great experience to the business traveler,” said Nick Vournakis, Carlson Wagonlit Travel’s former senior vice president of global marketing who was promoted to president, U.S. military and government markets this month. “But we need to do it in a way that we know is congruent and consistent with the goals and objectives of a managed travel program.”
Vournakis said there are three things that underpin personalization, and understanding them can help travel managers figure out who’s important in their ecosystem and how they can get the key players to work together.
The first key to personalization is geolocation. Travelers are already familiar with the concept through navigation apps like Google Maps, online booking tools, which often know where you are automatically when you sign in, or Uber, which has the ability to discern a traveler’s exact location.
“Smart phones have unlocked a critical piece of data that’s basically untapped in the business travel world,” Vournakis said. “They’ve given us the ability to kind of know at any given time where any of our travelers are.”
The second is interconnectivity, or getting apps, suppliers and data collectors to play along. An example of the concept is how an individual can sign into multiple applications using their Facebook or Google accounts, which allows the sharing of data across multiple platforms. It also applies to the embedding of outside apps into a platform, such as how Egencia has embedded RouteHappy into its TripNavigator booking app.
The third key to personalization is, of course, data. For a long time, travel providers have been hoarding data but doing very little, if anything, with it.
“If you look at a typical travel profile, the only thing you have in it is data that’s core to making a reservation,” Vournakis said. “It’s about all of the data elements necessary for an airline to kind of fulfill and write a PNR to the GDS. It’s just not enough. A personalized world means you need to know what people like, but that’s not stored in a travel profile.”
TMCs, Data and Personalization
About five years ago, Travel and Transport decided to change its development strategy. In an industry typically focused on catering everything to the travel manager, it wanted to shift its concentration to the consumer. The company didn’t call it personalization—that word wasn’t quite in vogue yet—but the foundation of what it hoped to do follows the principle.
“Even though these folks are in managed programs, we feel strongly that the traveler needs to have a great experience,” said Mike Kubasik, T&T’s executive vice president and chief information officer, “so they want to be part of the managed program, so they want to follow the rules, so when they go to book online or use a mobile they have a great experience.”
The company made strides to improve its web portal and mobile dashboard, eTTek Dash, allowing individual travelers to see unused air tickets, view past trips, receive relevant alerts and integrate personal travel itineraries on the platform. Kubasik said T&T is working with major suppliers to try to embed things like airline ancillaries or hotel check-in into the dashboard.
New Perspective: It's Not About the Journey
Roadmap's Jeroen van Velzen
__________________________
Speaking at Business Travel News’ Tech Talk conference in March, Roadmap CEO Jeroen van Velzen challenged travel managers to think differently about the purpose of their jobs. A short excerpt:
Fred Kofman was a professor at MIT and [now] he works at LinkedIn. He said, “Your job is not what you do, it’s the goals you pursue.” That’s pretty deep.
So, it’s not about what we are doing, but why we are doing it. Why are we procuring all those flights, hotels and cars in economical ways? Why do you want to keep your travelers safe?
It’s not about the journey. In essence, it’s because you want your colleagues to win. Your goal is to make sure [travelers]... accomplish their missions.
So do you have a different job? No, but I would challenge you to include in your job description one more thing: traveler experience management.
I really like the angel concept. We travel with our travelers in their pocket and say “there’s a cool restaurant on the corner“ or “take the subway it’s faster“ or “don’t go into that area it’s unsafe.”
Wouldn’t that be cool if we could do that, if we could create those experiences by traveling with our travelers?
That’s what mobile is all about. Therefore, your job starts to change because you can be closer to your travelers... and you start to influence their experiences.
Egencia is accustomed to using data to its full potential. With access to an unprecedented amount of “clickstreams,” both on the corporate side and through Expedia Inc., Egencia can track traveler behaviors in order to improve booking experiences.
“Having that data in one place is critical to extract insights,” said Michael Gulmann, vice president of global product and marketing.
On Egencia’s TripNavigator mobile app, travelers can view upcoming trips, make air and hotel bookings using past trips or frequent bookings from other travelers at their company and receive custom alerts about their journey. But the company is nevertheless trying to innovate the traveler experience further by expanding its partnerships—like the ones it already has with RouteHappy, Uber, iJet and International SOS—and looking into beacons or geofencing on the geolocation side.
“If you’re in a rush to get to your gate, how do we give you turn-by-turn guidance to get there? That really relies on beacon technology,” Gulmann said. “There are a lot of ideas there and we’re looking at the best way to implement [beacons]. They’ll become more prevalent in the next few years.”
Why Make Personalization Work?
HRS recently deployed a recommendation engine on its booking outlets that makes a selection of three top hotels based on previous bookings by the traveler or program, and features those three properties at the top of search results. Suzanne Neufang, vice president and managing director of the Americas, said the company found that the new feature has improved adoption of the tool and that the travelers who use it are more price conscious and give a hotel a better rating after their stay.
It’s an example how a simple shift to make a traveler’s experience simpler, faster and more personal can lead to better end-to-end results.
For Anthem global travel and events director Cindy Heston, personalization is a dual-value proposition, and it’s one she’s been working toward for years in her program.
“For the individual, it’s giving them a better experience,” she said. “It’s definitely something that helps them personally, and that’s part of our company goal, to make sure that our travel program is best in class in regard to employee satisfaction.” The dual side of it, she said, is that she’s also able to maintain great relationships with her suppliers by pushing value and share to them through a program that travelers actually want to use.
Heston relies on TripCase embedded in Anthem’s travel app to lead any location or trip-specific alerts, but she’s also developing individual app wrappers for road warriors, which outline what benefits each individual has access to during their trip and what those benefits mean. “So you have status with this hotel. What does that mean? It means you can go to the club floor, it means you have late checkout, if it’s sold out you can get a room up to 24 hours before,” Heston said. “We’re really highlighting the opportunities available to them.” That, in turn, drives compliance.
What are the obstacles?
Anyone who’s ever bought a gift for a loved one on Amazon or let a friend borrow their Netflix account knows that even the outlets that are great at personalization can still get it really wrong sometimes.
Torsten Kriedt, vice president of product planning and intelligence at BCD Travel, has a 5-year-old son, yet he still has online retailers trying to sell him diapers and baby food. “We have many providers out there that look at historical purchases and believe because of that they know you.”
HPE cut out 20 percent of its T&E spend last year and separated from a portion of its company, “so historical data doesn’t mean much because we have a completely new demographic of travelers and we go to different markets and we fly different carriers.” Eventually Callahan expects the company, with the help of CWT and Concur, will be able to have predictive itineraries and spend forecasts using predictive analytics, but first the data needs to be cleaner.
To stay on top of any trends or changes, Heston receives quarterly information from her TMC that features metrics from various databases, such as travelers’ frequent flier information and how many trips they’ve taken, pushed into one data source.
“We do look at it periodically through the years [to track personnel changes]. A lot of times we’ll work with HR too,” Heston said. “But we also mine the data so that we can catch it as travelers are utilizing the tool. We can see, ‘Oh here’s a trend,’ and we can get them in line with our preferred programs.”
The building blocks of personalization—data, geolocation, interconnectivity—are often the biggest concerns cited by travel managers when looking at advancing technology. How do travel managers and TMCs avoid coming off creepy when using geolocation to push catered messaging to travelers? How can a company ensure that they are not opening themselves up to risk when attempting to connect vast amounts data?
For instance, one travel manager said he had hoped to be able to bring together expense and credit card data with his company’s TMC data, but ended up bumping up against his company’s own stringent risk management team, which has led him to reexamine and firm up his data strategy before initiating the intensive vetting process.
Kreidt pointed out it can be tricky to get everyone to play along in the service and technology space. First, some degree of standardization is needed to make technology work together. “But second, who actually owns that traveler relationship? Who should be the one who holds and opens up on behalf of the traveler to those areas where they know they’d make a difference?”
Travelers, he added, have to be part of the conversation. They have to be able to opt in or out.
As far as whether travelers would be willing to opt in for the sake of personalization, Vournakis said he expects they would if doing so meant a better, streamlined travel experience.
“My data is my currency,” Vournakis said, “and with my currency I barter for experience. I’m willing to do that and I think there’s a tremendous amount of evidence that people are willing to do that.”