Do We Still Know What Corporate Travel Is?

Wikipedia defines “Corporate Travel Management” as:

“…the function of managing a company’s strategic approach to travel, the negotiations with all vendors, day-to-day operation of the corporate travel program, traveler safety and security, credit-card management and travel and expenses data management.”

It is a pretty good definition (I think) and one that our industry, and all its parts, have centered ourselves around. But as we look ahead into 2024 and consider some of the emerging trends, I can’t help but ask—will it last?

Strategy, by definition, is about making choices. Companies choose what kind of products they want to sell and who they want to sell them to; it is as much about what you want to do as it is about what you don’t want to do. Great strategies have both parts.

So, let’s overlay some of the ongoing travel industry trends onto this thinking:

• Pandemic-driven consolidation is limiting travel supplier choices at many locations. This has happened across the whole industry (and is still going on).
• Travel suppliers are increasingly going direct to travelers, often through traveler loyalty and credit cards programs, creating offers you can’t see or replicate.
• NDC is finally making significant inroads, and while it has many positives for the industry, infinitely unique offers will make comparison shopping more difficult. That isn’t NDC bashing, it’s just a statement of fact—not saying it’s a bad thing.
• Multiple companies now solve the problem of acquiring and standardizing travel data, including many travel suppliers themselves. Hiding behind “duty of care” as the rationale for your rigid travel program is getting less and less relevant.
• Generative AI is writing travel policies and answering supplier RFPs for you. Everyone is doing it (including your travelers when justifying their need to travel).
• VR continues to improve, with Apple’s Vision Pro joining the party in February. Will the world’s largest company do to VR (and telepresence) what the iPhone did to the Blackberry?

All these trends in isolation may just be interesting news bits. But when you start to mix them up and mash them together, there’s only one conclusion: The choices you once implemented in your travel program are becoming less and less relevant. Ignore that, and you won’t have a strategic approach to travel anymore.

Think about it. You spent years training your employees to trust the online booking tool you gave them, and to follow this policy and these approval steps to book business travel. You then built rigid processes to collect data, keep your travelers safe and supported while on the road, and fully integrated all of it into HR and expense systems so you could ultimately report on the savings you generated.

But what really happens? Your travelers know that approving a trip is pretty subjective, and when it is approved, they are often engineering their trip for maximum personal comfort for as much as the travel policy will allow. (Show me a company with an 8-hour business class policy, and I’ll show you how many people take a connection to their final destination where the first leg is shockingly longer than 8 hours). They come into the search process with their own preferences in mind, often searching for options before they even log into the OBT. And if they don’t get their way, they will then book directly and rationalize it to their managers as saving the company money because it was cheaper that way. What manager is going to reject that expense? Sound familiar?

Now spin the question around. If a traveler can get a better discount by going supplier direct, and you can capture the relevant data points to ensure you know about it and they are safe, is that wrong? After all, a lack of control doesn’t mean lack of management, and a strategy can employ any number of tactics and choices to be successful. If suppliers are investing heavily in self-service tools and willing to provide discounts you can’t get yourself, or if your traveler lives someplace where one supplier dominates the market and you make them use someone else, why are you fighting the tide?

Change is the only constant in the world, and big changes are happening now. Like it or not, the balance of power is shifting away from the company and back to the traveler, and everyone wants to work with them to nudge their spending power over their way. You can view this as right or wrong, but it is unlikely to change either way, and your main choice is to adapt or not. Control is not always necessary to accomplish the same goals, and things will only get worse. And by the way, the trends happening in 2024 are just the appetizer course for bigger impacts in 2025 and beyond.

So maybe it’s time to update the definition of Corporate Travel Management. And if you’re unwilling, well, you can go ask Blackberry how that worked out for them.