Travel management companies BCD Travel, Corporate Travel Management and TripActions each are separately launching new technology offerings focusing on risk management and/or travel disruption.
BCD has developed a mobile app, BCD Alert, for its clients to monitor and respond to travel alerts that affect their company's travelers. When there is a risk or alert at a destination, the app sends the travel or security manager a push notification that pulls up a list of travelers with active PNRs in a 50-mile radius of the destination, BCD VP of global product marketing Heather Wright said Wednesday at the Media Day event at the Global Business Travel Association's 2021 Convention. Directly from the app, the managers can reach out to the traveler via SMS, email or phone call, she said.
TripActions, meanwhile, announced a new feature, Click-to-Accept Schedule Change, which sends the traveler a notification when an airline makes a change to a scheduled flight. Travelers can view and accept proposed alternative flights without the need to contact the airline or an agent.
"This is the first closed-loop cycle in the corporate space," TripActions chief travel officer Danny Finkel said at the Media Day event. "Nothing has gone beyond notifications in the [travel management company] space. They all require you to call in or email in."
TripActions reported that 30 percent of its flight bookings in 2021 have had some sort of airline-initiated schedule change, and 11 percent of those changes were "major," meaning it changed arrival time by more than 30 minutes or changed the final destination city. The functionality also helps travelers avoid the long wait times that airlines often have had for their phone service lines, Finkel said.
CTM plans to launch early next year a new technology suite that includes a global trip approval system, CTM Approve. The suite sources passenger name record data from all of CTM's global locations to feed into the TMC's risk management systems. With the approval tool, that PNR data can be run through a single approval instance to generate approval notifications to employees.
The suite also includes an enhanced profile tool that integrates global HR feeds to provide access to all employee profiles on a single tool.
A recent CTM survey of clients showed that 80 percent rated travel risk, safety and well-being as their top priority in 2022, CTM global chief technology officer Mike Kubasik said at the Media Day event.