Getting the Trust Back in 2024

The travel ecosystem is changing with revolutionary intensity. High travel prices and content fragmentation are combining with a general failure to reconcile what is important to travel suppliers, travelers and, ultimately, the business itself with current market realities. 

Travelers express their skepticism in so many ways—blogs, traveler surveys and booking behaviors are just a few—and they are getting the attention of their business leaders. The C-suite already knows, though. They are road warriors who use hotels and mostly fly commercial, so they see firsthand the same market shifts, and they are questioning whether managed travel still delivers value.  

Suppliers are asking the same question from a different angle. In a world where loyalty has become the most highly valued element of the travel marketplace—whether leisure, business or bleisure—the supplier C-suite in many ways is adjusting its expectations of what value managed travel should deliver. 

2024 is the year that managed travel will reframe the promises we make and work out how to keep those promises to satisfy more travelers and C-suite executives, on both the supply side and buy side. The key, however, will be for all stakeholders to lean into the friction points and harness them to ignite innovation and rebuild trust throughout the ecosystem. 

Priorities and Promises—Shifting the Mindset

Duty of care; cost savings; environment, social and governance; compliance; talent acquisition and retention; data privacy; and overall efficiency when it comes to process and tools—these have been the traditional priorities of managed travel. How can we reframe the promises around these priorities and have a positive impact in 2024? 

The Promise: Low Pricing, High Value  

The promise that the managed travel channel will deliver the lowest available rate according to policy survived for the U.S. marketplace until recently, when American Airlines shifted hard to New Distribution Capability, among a number of other supplier moves in air and hotel categories. But let's consider what we already know: Hundreds of airlines across the globe have never been in a global distribution system, yet travelers find their way to them.

The Mindset Shift: Mandated air booking channels will face massive scrutiny in 2024 from both suppliers and travelers, and likely will result in a program having less value to both parties. U.S. companies will have to stop sweeping this under the rug this year. They'll begin looking at channel models embraced in other markets, innovate with tools that open new channels, guide employee decision-making per channel and gather critical data for duty of care and analysis. In doing so, they'll have to adjust policies to put more trust in employees.

The Promise: ESG Is Primary to Travel Management Strategy

This is a new and pervasive promise. And it feels like a promise backed by evidence in objective and key results plans, like those required by the Science-based Target Initiative, in most every global organization. But it's a not promise kept yet, at least not by most companies. Disruption in the managed travel value chain and in distribution overall set the stage for a mindset shift, bringing differentiated content into managed booking channels—or activating new channels to play in the managed space. 

The Mindset Shift: Even if the promise is enabled by differentiated content, the promise can't be kept unless everyone in the ecosystem acknowledges that sustainable or DE&I-oriented choices may not be the most cost-effective. It's up to the company to recalibrate value metrics to align with ESG—or not—in 2024, but the tolerance for lip service is closing. Only data and evidence will establish the trust needed between suppliers, travel managers and travelers to bring ESG into the mainstream for travel management, but we're not there yet by a long shot. 

The Promise: Travel Risk Management Programs Are Effective

I've benchmarked with at least 50 companies on TRM. Less than half of travelers' bookings are captured in duty-of-care processes for most companies, especially those with large footprints. Fifty percent is not enough, which has been proven by every crisis in the past 20 years. Political unrest is at the forefront of our minds, and it has multiple downstream effects, especially in duty of care. Legacy practices defined by booking channel mandates are unraveling as content fragmentation has pushed business travel bookings to unmanaged channels. Arguably the processes were never robust beyond a handful of markets. 

The Mindset Shift: New channel-management and data-capture strategies must take hold to ensure duty of care. In addition to that, however, employers will require explicit employee buy-in to travel and data policies, with an understanding that employee commitment to TRM processes is the only path toward compliance with local laws and regulations. TRM will be among the trickiest propositions for 2024, given travelers' loss of faith in the company's ability to deliver comprehensive travel content—and perhaps unseen to travelers, how well the company can track itinerary changes in a multi-channel environment. 

The Promise: A Managed Program Delivers Savings

Price increases are everywhere. Suppliers continue to recalibrate how discounts, value-added products, and services are tied to corporate volumes. Managed programs, in turn, will have to take a bigger-picture view of value in 2024. If stakeholders can work together, a broader mindset will yield management strategies that have actual impact in a marketplace where the value of corporate travel is scrutinized by more suppliers than ever before. 

The Mindset Shift: Consideration of factors contributing to employee productivity and the return on investment of travel are equally vital for long-term success. The marketplace in 2024 will force managed programs to consider making a new promise to balance cost, well-being and sustainability since pure savings are impossible for most to achieve. Since driving loyalty figures more prominently in supply-side value—and the promise of status, convenience and rewards are sought by business travelers themselves—managed travel will seek to reconcile the corporate program with how it can participate more deeply with loyalty and leverage it to the program's advantage.