ABACUS has released the latest results in its Corporate Travel Practices Survey conducted with views of 82 of the region’s top corporate travel brands, with insights on structural and behavioral issues facing corporate travel managers and how they can be addressed.
The travel technology solutions provider offers five specific action points.
Firstly, travel management companies (TMCs) and corporate travel agencies (CTAs) must be able to align content from multiple sources into a single itinerary, as some 87 per cent pointed to lower prices in B2C sites as one of the reasons why travellers go off policy.
Robert Bailey, president and CEO of Abacus, said: “Technology can aggregate disparate content to offer new forms of fixed and dynamic packaging. It will ensure TMCs and CTAs manage more of the clients’ business, with wider sourcing countering increased competition online.”
Secondly, with over half of respondents reporting an increase in spend on ancillaries, CTAs and TMCs should detail ancillary options in clients’ travel policies and keep track of choices made for pre-trip approval and post-trip expense reconciliation.
Bailey said: “As more ancillaries are introduced, it is vital that their processing then reveals the full cost of each flight, not just the price of an unbundled basic seat, especially with so many corporate travel policies requiring the choice of lowest available fare.”
Corporate travel professionals also need to motivate travellers to use corporate booking tools. The Abacus study highlighted that a third of companies are still seeing clients resist self-service technology – South-east Asian clients prefer to talk to travel consultants while in North Asia there is resistance against travel arrangers.
But where CTAs and TMCs can overcome initial resistance, evidence shows that use of corporate booking tools grows “exponentially”.
Fourthly, TMCs and CTAs must leverage mobile tools or risk having non-compliant booking behaviour in favour of apps by OTAs and LCCs.
The last suggestion is that expense management must be automated. Despite clients putting more of their travel budgets into secondary expenses and the nature of such expenditure evolving, only 44 per cent of survey respondents work with clients to manage secondary expenses.
“Expense management should now be integral to the TMC pitch, especially when it comes to attracting global accounts,” noted Bailey.
Findings from the Corporate Travel Practices Survey will be available to delegates at the Abacus International Conference in Abu Dhabi between October 14 and 17.
