The recent webinar hosted by Cvent focussed on corporate travel challenges, trends and opportunities. This webinar helped hoteliers to gain a better understanding of the corporate travel managers they work with and facilitated them to prepare for the 2019 RFP season. During the webinar, Cvent also introduced Business Transient – a complete solution to source, benchmark and audit hotel corporate travel programmes.
The webinar discussed some of the biggest issues in corporate travel, including:
Time Spent on RFPs – 61%* of travel managers say, “Building and maintaining travel supplier relations and contracts take up the majority of their time and, of course, is also one of the ‘most important’ activities they manage”.
If travel managers are expecting to spend more time in hashing out contracts with hoteliers every single year, we think it’s critical that we work together to figure out a better way to manage and streamline this process.
Availability of Rates – Or more specifically, lack of hotel availability at preferred rates – because as hotels are becoming more sophisticated in yield-management techniques, business travellers are more and more unable to find and book rooms at their preferred rates. So, we need to figure out how to provide reliable availability to your Corporate Accounts while still maximising your revenue potential.
Brexit Impact – As per a survey conducted by Hospitality Booking Agents Association, Brexit has already had a noticeable impact on the business of 52% of hotels and other meeting venues**. There have been both positive and negative effects. On the upside, we’re finding that rates aren’t necessarily going down in local currency, but the weakness of the pound in 2017 made hotels much more affordable for foreign business travellers. But on the other side, when British business travellers were going just about anywhere else – hotels were more expensive because of the exchange rate.
New Trends – With 61%* of travel managers considering technology solutions as ‘very important’ to their role, it’s imperative that hoteliers are aware of and involved in the evolution of travel technology to keep up with the demands of their customers.
GDPR – One of the biggest demands right now is the protection of their traveller’s data … so, hoteliers who haven’t yet prepared for GDPR, it will get effective from 25th May 2018, must act now. Because you’re going to be held accountable for ensuring the protection of personal data, not only about your customers but also your employees. Know more about GDPR here.
Artificial Intelligence – We’ve seen the emergence of “virtual travel assistants” as early as in 2015. Now they’re incorporating traveller personalisation, round-the-clock monitoring and alerts, predictive rebooking, local recommendations – overall, providing a better experience for the traveller while still enforcing travel policies. It’s a travel manager’s dream! One AI technology is already processing 75%*** of hotel requests. But everyone isn’t quite there yet, and many travel managers and travellers still want the human interaction part of the process. But as technology advances, and AI improves, the human element will become less and less important. The same can be said for some of the AI advancements at hotels – from strategic pricing through machine learning, to room service or concierge robots, and even entire hotels run by robots. So AI really is here to stay, but, of course, with the business travellers experience being more important now, we need to figure out how to balance AI efficiencies with the type of service-level that only humans can provide, at least, for now.
Business Intelligence – So how do we get to a world where AI is as common as OTAs??? The answer is data and a deeper analysis of that data through business intelligence! We’ve found that leveraging travel data to track programme performance and support decision making is extremely important to travel managers and its just going to become even more important in the future. Right now, it’s a fairly time-consuming activity, with 57%* of travel managers saying it takes up most of their time. But, at the same time, it’s critical to have access to this data for negotiating contracts, identifying savings and monitoring compliance – basically without this data, they really wouldn’t be able to do their job. So, we’re seeing more and more tools available on both sides of the market – to help travel managers understand their programmes better, and to help hotels understand their position in the market and to be able to price effectively.
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