The mobile migration is complete.
Only two of the 300 travelers queried in Business Travel
News’ latest survey—of business travelers who took four or more business trips in the past 12 months—has resisted the magnetic pull of the smartphone. One of those individuals actually eschewed the phone for a next-generation tablet or smartwatch, leaving just a single business traveler among 300
surveyed without the power of a smart device in his or her hands.
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These travelers aren’t stopping with one device, either. With 98 percent toting smartphones, 77 percent packing tablets and 20 percent wearing smartwatches, they are duplicating and even triplicating their access to information on the go, including, of course, travel content and travel apps.
As of September 2015, there were approximately 65,000 travel apps in the Apple App Store. As of June 2015, Google Maps had grabbed the No. 5 spot of most-frequently accessed apps among iOS and Android platforms with nearly 76.5 million unique monthly users. Apple Maps grabbed the No. 11 spot
with nearly 35 million unique monthly users, while The Weather Channel hit the top 20 list twice with its app at No. 16 and its widget at No. 20. Are these travel apps? Not exactly, and they are definitely not managed travel apps, but they do give business travelers critical information in the palm of their hands
wherever they are in the world and whenever they need it.
That’s the mindset shift that travel managers will need to get their heads around if they want to be successful in supporting their travelers on the road, said Marina Hegeman, managing director of TouristMobile, which provides real-time mobile travel messaging and support to employees of
large, Europe-based companies. She has worked with big travel spenders like KPMG for several years.
“It’s not really about apps and smartphones,” she said, noting that companies often toss a few apps at their travelers to address specific pain points or even just to bridge a relevance gap. “It’s really about understanding the traveler and the travel journey at any point in time and in
the context of the decisions they need to make.”
The problem is that we aren’t there yet—not by a long shot—according to the BTN research. We may all have migrated to mobile devices, but the shift to a mobile mindset has barely begun. The good news, however, is that about half of travel managers are starting to acknowledge the
lag and to see the benefit of pursuing a more aggressive—and a more informed—mobile travel strategy.
Mobile Travel Policy: Where Are We Now?
Few companies claim to have a comprehensive mobile travel policy. BTN’s Mobile Migration survey indicates that most companies that have implemented policy have taken a scattershot approach, creating guidelines on a case-by-case basis, either as the company discovers new mobile app categories
to implement (in the case of meetings and event apps, for example) or as problems arise (consider the spike in roaming and data costs for international travelers). Even this tactical approach has permeated only about three-quarters of the companies surveyed.
The most common mobile travel policies are associated with itinerary management apps—53 percent of companies said they had policies around them. Policy implementation falls off precipitously from there. Only 46 percent had policies around mobile communications in emergency situations and 42
percent around mobile expense filing, while 41 percent attempt to reign in mobile booking or rebooking for air travel. Less than one-third of the 202 travel buyers surveyed have addressed roaming and data costs, while less than a quarter try to manage social itinerary sharing.
The tactical approach reveals a reticence among travel managers to engage fully in the migration to mobile. One reason for this hesitation may be the conflation of mobile technologies and “open booking,” or Managed Travel 2.0, as some have coined it. The concepts emerged
simultaneously, as mobile technologies signaled a shift to a highly empowered corporate traveler with access to more outside-the-box information than ever. The fear of fragmenting access to travel content further and unintentionally supporting an open booking end game may have prevented the managed travel
industry from taking more advantage early on.
These days, security concerns represent a major hesitation for corporations. This point emerged in the survey and at BTN’s Innovate conference in September.
A handful of companies choose to ban external mobile travel apps, either in part or whole, some of those preferring to develop their own internal travel apps. Success rates with this strategy have been limited, according to travel managers attending the Innovate conference. Considering the
abundance of travel apps available to consumers, travel managers at these companies—often representing highly regulated industries like healthcare, insurance and finance—report slow development and low adoption of internally developed apps. Instead of waiting for internally sanctioned tools on issued
devices, travelers go outside the program, downloading consumer apps on their personal devices. The counterargument holds, of course, that because travelers are availing themselves of apps anyway, corporations should manage the system rather than letting travel data roam untrammeled in the wild.
BTN survey data showed, however, that travel managers are not fighting for a breakout role in that effort.
Only 43 percent of travelers pegged the travel management role as “very involved” in setting mobile travel policies, but they failed to identify any other department that was more engaged. Forty-two percent said IT departments were “very involved,” while HR and procurement departments each
were much less involved. One option would be to outsource the strategy, relying on a TMC, consultant or third-party technology provider to run the charge, but fewer than half of the travel buyers surveyed said their companies are taking that option.
Companies with very large travel programs have made the most progress, citing higher levels of travel manager involvement in mobile and a willingness to go to outside partners to support overall mobile travel strategies.
The Value Disconnect
Survey data revealed another key issue in corporates’ weak embrace of mobile travel tools. Only about half of travel managers realize how intrinsic to the business travel experience travel apps have become.
Asked to rate the importance of a series of mobile travel functions, travel managers and travelers differed in their value emphasis. Travelers valued the more personal aspects of business travel: itinerary management, destination information and itinerary sharing were all on their top
10 list. For travel managers, functions like expense approval, access to emergency assistance and the ability to deliver travel policy communications figured prominently in the top 10. This result is entirely predictable, but another, more meaningful difference also emerged.
Seventy-five percent of travelers said flight check-in was “very important,” but only 58 percent of travel managers pegged it as equally important for their programs. Taking all functions into consideration to calculate an estimate of the overall importance of mobile functions to each
surveyed group, travelers’ average mobile travel importance rating was 67. Travel manager’s average rating was 39.
That’s a huge gap, and one that puts into perspective the 17 percentage point “importance gap” between travelers and travel managers on the simple issue of mobile flight check-in. Language translation, which did not make the top 10 list of either group, is “very important” to 54 percent of travelers
but only 13 percent of travel managers.
After winning BTN’s 2015 Innovate Award, Roadmap CEO Jeroen van Velzen summed up the situation. “You need to figure out what your travelers are doing while they are traveling. You might think you know, but you don’t,” he said. “There are a bunch of assumptions that we need to validate on
what makes sense to invest in. In many cases, what you see now is that traveler managers put out a very long requirement list of what should go into an app, thinking that is what travelers want, but we don’t know what travelers want. We have to figure that out.”
Secret To Success: Keying Into Travelers’ Wants
The understanding that travelers may interact with mobile capabilities differently than travel managers expect is key when approaching mobile travel management. To expect those surprises and to be able to balance them with management needs is critical if travel managers want to engage their
travelers and drive adoption in whatever mobile travel environment they decide to provide.
It’s also critical to survey travelers in order to serve different types within the mobile travel environment. Hegeman suggests, at first, segmenting by frequent and infrequent travelers, domestic and international travelers and perhaps age groups. Every travel manager, however,
will want to segment groups that make sense for his or her travel population.
In BTN’s research, for example, less frequent travelers were keener on accessing destination information via mobile apps than were travelers who take 25 trips or more annually. Travelers younger than 35 were more likely to share itineraries and demand social connections while
traveling. Frequent travelers, no matter what age, on the other hand, had little desire for destination information or social recommendation sharing. Rather, they wanted mobile access to upgrades and amenities at a heavier rate than any other group. Frequent travelers also resisted corporate-endorsed apps
the most and had little desire for travel policy communications.
It is critical to engage frequent travelers, the most difficult to influence, in the mobile travel strategy and implementation process. “Getting 40 heavy travelers in a room is amazing. It represents a lot of knowledge,” said Hegeman, who conducts workshops with new clients to dig
deeper into traveler segmentation and workshops with existing clients to mine app-usage data to refine their mobile travel strategies. Plus, she said, “You will be amazed at the ideas business travelers have. They are really smart, and sometimes their ideas need very little effort to deliver.”
Once the traveler information is gathered, the strategy shaping can begin. “This is when the travel manager can say, ‘I like A or B, but I don’t like C and this happens,’” said Hegeman. “It’s fair to say … ‘It’s not my intention to invest in a certain thing.’ And that’s OK; it’s a conscious
decision.” What’s not OK, she said, is the corporation thinking it can shape a mobile travel management strategy from a position of command and control and without delivering what the traveler wants. “That will fail,” she said. “You obviously won’t do everything the travelers suggest, but [you have to make it]
a conscious decision when you do something else.”
For some travel managers, it’s a big leap to take, but a necessary one if they want to compete against consumer-oriented travel apps for their travelers’ engagement and deliver on the promise of mobile travel management.
Methodology
BTN’s 2015 Mobile Migration report includes a survey of 202 travel buyers from The BTN Group Advisory Board and Research Council and the readership of Business
Travel News and Travel Procurement. BTN gathered those responses via Survey Monkey between June 23 and Oct. 14, 2015. The report also includes a survey Equation Research conducted in September of 300 people who had traveled by air for business at least four
times in the previous 12 months.
This report originally appeared in the Oct. 26, 2015
edition of Business Travel News.