Managed travel programmes exist for three basic reasons which don’t sit naturally with direct booking channels: corporate governance, data analytics and the ability to service bookings. CORPORATE GOVERNANCE The ability to track travellers, monitor emissions and monitor commercial partners (the geographic or political associations of suppliers, for example) is vital for corporations. Park believes explaining this obligation is necessary for travellers to accept travel policy. At Parexel they take pains to explain the bigger picture on factors such as risk management and to encourage travellers to think on the macro level, overall for the company, rather than their individual trip. “Sometimes it’s limiting but you can’t compromise on risk management. You can’t book outside [of preferred channels] because then you don’t know where your travellers are. You have a duty of care obligation which is something people understand. “If we notice a travel alert and we email [a traveller] to ask how they are, we can often receive a ‘we had no idea you were tracking me but thank you’ reply,” he says. Angel Gallego, executive vice president travel distribution, Amadeus, believes that corporates are more conscious of their travellers’ welfare since Covid, but also of carbon emissions. “Sustainability is gaining more traction, particularly in northern Europe.”
According to Paul Tilstone, managing partner of business travel consultancy Festive Road, people can’t get the sort of rich data that is needed for duty of care and carbon emissions monitoring unless they’re in an NDC world. “You obtain this at point of sale. It’s much harder to get it in an analogue world,” he says.
There’s always a generation of new content because of deregulation or new players or smarter marketing and packaging
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SPRING 2023 | businesstravelnewseurope.com
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