With corporate travel remaining at a standstill due to the Covid-19 pandemic and no clear end in sight, the industry's short- to mid-term prognosis is murky at best. But there also is a strong undercurrent of hope for the post-Covid future. By putting an extended halt to travel operations, the outbreak has sparked the potential to reimagine the future of the industry, affording buyers and providers alike an unexpected opportunity to address pre-existing issues, while laying bare like never before the vital organizational role served by travel departments. Taken together, those dynamics could create an ideal environment for innovation, spurring development of new products and revamped processes that will help corporate travel emerge from the downturn healthier than before.
In fact, that work has already begun. The sudden onset of the Covid-19 virus in Europe and the U.S. in March threw the corporate travel industry into chaos, with corporate travel managers and their TMC partners scrambling to bring travelers in from the road, modify bookings and adjust travel policy on the fly. But when the dust settled with essentially all travel grounded for the foreseeable future, corporate travel departments and TMCs had a core operation—planning and supporting travel—removed from their plate, freeing up resources and mental bandwidth for buyers and suppliers to take a breath, step back and look at the bigger picture.
"The daily firefighting and dealing with the problems of day-to-day travel management has pretty much disappeared," for most corporate travel departments, said Keesup Choe, CEO of data analytics specialist PredictX. "When you get rid of that, you have the head-space to think strategically."
Travel Innovation Persists, Even Amid Covid-19
"I think this is a great time for companies to look at their travel policy going forward … and review processes that are in place to ensure they're still valid and are covering what we need to cover," said Barbara Arena, principal category manager for global travel sourcing at Oracle Corp.
Meanwhile, as corporations attempt to navigate the operational effects of Covid, travel departments have been thrust to the organizational forefront, drawing increased attention from executive leadership.
"We're seeing a raised level of visibility for the travel program within the organization," said Mark McSpadden, vice president of global product strategy and experience for American Express Global Business Travel. "For our large customers, every incident response council and task force that has come together includes travel [department leaders] as an essential piece of that team."
"The spotlight on travel probably has never been as high as it is today" within organizations, agreed Choe. "Stakeholders are asking travel managers all sorts of questions they may never have asked before … and if you can answer them confidently, that builds your credibility."
And travel suppliers are coordinating with clients to help enable travel departments to answer those questions and leverage the newfound attention from corporate brass to drive program enhancements.
"We're using this opportunity to work more closely with our customers to complete customized feature requests, ranging from policy updates to team management," noted Duke Chung, CEO of booking and expense provider TravelBank. "Broadly, we're continuing to look at what else is needed to support the travel industry, the travel experience and our customers overall."
TravelBank also has seen an uptick in interest from new prospects, Chung added. "Many of those who are reaching out right now are doing so because they're taking this downtime to evaluate and, in some cases, re-evaluate their current travel program," he said.
"We've spent hours on calls with dozens of our customers hearing about current pain points with their travel program and discussing ways that we could help with creative solutions, noted Devon Tenova, CEO of corporate guest and candidate travel specialist Pana. "We've discussed everything from improving traveler experiences to decreasing booking tool leakage to increasing program savings."
Meanwhile, TripActions CEO Ariel Cohen said the travel management provider has emphasized collaboration via its customer advisory board since the onset of Covid, noting that board meetings—held virtually—have been "the most well-attended they've ever been" during the pandemic. "That's because business travel managers want to know how they will manage travel on the day after [Covid]."
Suppliers are dealing with their own Covid-related struggles, and many—including Pana, TravelBank and TripActions—have had to reduce workforce as revenue streams derived from client travel have gone dry. But those cuts generally have affected travel support and marketing functions, while research and development departments have remained largely intact and active.
"Our product team has actually been busier than ever before," Cohen said. "We are investing a lot of effort right now on innovating for the world post-Covid, and in a way, you can [experiment] easier now, when you don't have [travel] usage, because you can take more risks without needing to be worried about breaking something."
Indeed, for corporate travel management stakeholders across the industry, the opportunity cost of exploring and implementing new approaches currently is as low as it likely ever will be.
"If you want to invest thought and planning into [innovation], you're not going to get this time again," said PredictX's Choe. "At some point, we're going to get back to people traveling and suddenly you won't have time to think strategically and build new foundations, so we're encouraging everyone to take advantage of this."
New Priorities, New Possibilities
TravelBank's Chung compared Covid-19's potential to serve as creative disruption to another shockwave sent through the economy just over a decade ago.
"If the startups that were born during the 2008 financial crisis are any indication, great innovation comes from the hardest times," said Chung.
In the case of the Covid-19 pandemic, the most immediate innovation began as the virus was largely contained to Asia. With corporate travel still taking place elsewhere, several virus-tracking services emerged to help travel managers monitor the spread of the outbreak and assess risk for particular destinations.
The earliest such services were offered by travel safety and critical event specialists, such as Stabilitas and Safeture, both of which added Covid-tracking to their existing risk monitoring platforms, gathering and centralizing data from sources including the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, World Health Organization and Johns Hopkins University.
With trackers expected to continue to play a vital role as travel resumes, TMCs recently have begun rolling out tracking tools of their own. In mid-May, World Travel Inc. launched WorldWatch, which features an interactive risk assessment map with realtime travel advisories and risk ratings incorporating Covid-19 information.
TripActions also has added Covid-tracking capabilities, rolling out an integrated reporting and monitoring tool within its travel booking and management platform. The company also added a service—powered by Cirium—to automatically track and apply airfare waivers stemming from the flood of unused tickets in the wake of pandemic.
"We're trying to make sure that our [client] companies and their travelers are getting back to business safely while also being cost-effective," said TripActions vice president of product Anique Drumright, who led development of the tool.
While the importance of Covid-specific tracking presumably will decline as the pandemic abates, the importance of having systems in place to monitor potential future large-scale events so corporate travel programs can be better prepared next time around has been made clear.
"This foundation is applicable—obviously, with some changes—for political unrest, natural disasters, future global health crises and other things that could potentially disrupt travel," Drumright noted.
Duty of care in general is expected to become a major post-Covid emphasis, with the pressure ratcheted up on corporates—and, by extension their TMCs—to ensure employees remain safe and healthy when traveling.
"Clearly, duty of care is going to become more ingrained in travel," said Will Tate, partner with Gold-Spring Consulting. "The [case for] duty of care and why [travelers] should be in the infrastructure we've built as travel buyers and suppliers is stronger today than it ever has been."
While travel restrictions and pre-trip approval are expected to be the order of the day for many companies as travel resumes, the ultimate goal is to empower managers and employees to make informed, safe decisions about travel without bogging down the process. To accomplish that goal, communication will be essential, some buyers noted.
"We're looking at the communication process and asking how we're going to be communicating to our travelers in ways that fit in this new norm in travel," said Oracle's Arena—noting that her company is paying particular attention to delivering messaging within the corporate booking tool.
Along with delivering policy guidance and other critical alerts, booking tools also are a key vector of communication about end-supplier health and cleanliness standards and processes—which likely will become central criteria when shopping for a flight or hotel in the post-Covid landscape. TMC Corporate Travel Management has integrated airline health and safety data into its Lightning proprietary online booking tool, which now displays data such as airport and cabin cleaning, health screening, food and beverage hygiene and flexible booking conditions, powered by ATPCO's Routehappy Rich Content. TripActions also has integrated such information into its booking flow as part of its recent update.
The premium placed on hygiene and sterilization procedures also has given rise to third-party services designed to ensure those processes are being followed, noted Matt Zito, managing partner for Travel Startups Incubator, which invests in early-stage ventures in the travel industry.
"Safety and cleanliness procedures are a huge responsibility suppliers will have going forward," Zito said. "One of the companies we have an investment in is actually in the process of launching a data-driven auditing and reporting product that will let corporate travel managers verify hotels' safety and cleanliness protocols, so they and their travelers can feel comfortable using those suppliers."
The upped emphasis on duty of care also will make preventing travel program leakage—already a longstanding priority for travel managers—even more vital post-pandemic. While employees likely will be more cognizant of adhering to preferred booking methods during the early stages of travel's return, old habits eventually could emerge. For some, that means it's incumbent upon travel managers to redouble efforts to improve the booking experience and keep travelers in-channel.
"Much of the work that's been done over the past several years was to make the travel process easy and frictionless," noted Amex GBT's McSpadden. "And those principles will very much apply in this shift to an optimization around health and safety."
But because preventing all leakage is not generally feasible no matter how positive a booking experience a company can deliver, services designed to capture off-channel bookings, such as Concur TripLink, itinerary email parsing tool Traxo and browser extension Shep, could deliver enhanced value in funneling the maximum number of bookings into travel management systems for duty of care.
Having access to complete and accurate travel data also could be even more important as corporations focus on calculating the return on investment for travel. Travel managers in recent years have used ever morepowerful data technology to access insights into ROI for increasingly granular levels of travel.
Meanwhile, Covid-19-related health risks, mandatory quarantine periods and other travel restrictions, as well as supply contraction for air carriers and hotels, will put pressure on the cost side of the equation, forcing companies to think hard about the goal of travel and the trips that are considered necessary.
In addition, the economic impact of the pandemic on many companies' financial situation has added even more urgency to assess travel spending.
TravelBank's clients "have consistently expressed that reducing and controlling spend in this market downturn is a top priority," Chung said.
While some costs will rise, the shutdown of travel has created room in other areas for significant saving for travel buyers—who currently have unprecedented leverage to restructure their arrangements with suppliers. TMCs are talking about subscription models as well as other configurations, and buyers say every option is on the table.
More inclusive pricing parameters with preferred airlines, which would take into account such ancillary costs as baggage fees, also could be within reach, noted PredictX's Choe.
"If you negotiate an air contact, you really want to know in advance what the cost is going to be, not find out after the travel that these ancillary costs have doubled your actual ticket price or something like that," Choe said. "The pendulum of negotiation [power] is bound to swing back toward the buyer, who I think will be negotiating for more transparent, more inclusive and better-value contracts from suppliers."
Making major changes to a travel program is, of course, a tall task in any environment, let alone one in which companies continue to manage the fallout from Covid-19. But those who can keep an eye to the future and devote the time, effort—and money—to develop and implement program improvements now, stand to reap major benefits in the long term.
"You have the time now to rethink the future and form a new strategy," said Choe. "Those companies that can actually use that time—and a little bit of investment—will gain a huge advantage."