DISTRIBUTION / TRAVEL MANAGERS
DATA ANALYTICS Data is required not just for good corporate monitoring practice. It is the key to understanding behaviour and sound commercial decision- making. It is not just about how much a trip costs but what factors contributed to that cost – business or standard class rail, time of journey, time of booking, was a seat booking included or any other extra amenity. The challenge for travel managers is that what the company is paying for is frequently more than just transporting a traveller from A to B. Mihai Dinu, global travel manager for UiPath, gives an example. “Besides pricing,
explanation for the difficulty with changes to bookings and refunds. The proportion of NDC bookings in its early days was heavily weighted towards leisure so this gripe has only become more prominent with the increase of corporate usage. It’s also perhaps because bookings increasingly involve more than just the flight. David Bishop, chief operating officer at Gray Dawes Group, stressed the commercial importance for agents of selling not just the flight but what goes with it. “The traveller might buy a flight but buy their parking direct and might do the hotel direct,” he says. Agents need to sell that airport parking as part of the initial booking and are increasingly doing so. However, the more extras on one element (the air seat, the meal on the plane) combined with the more elements of a journey – the parking, the accommodation, the transfers – the greater the likelihood that service will be required. This is perhaps why IATA’s NDC initiative has expanded to encompass One Order and One ID. One Order will be key to corporate travel management in the future. According to IATA, it will eventually erase the need for multiple reservation records – e-ticket numbers, airline reference numbers and GDS reference numbers, for example – merging them into a single ticket format. That With NDC, you can get the seat and other extras at the time of booking in a single transaction and payment
reference number can then be used across the distribution chain, making servicing the traveller easier across any point in the journey. IATA has also introduced One ID which it believes will “transform the passenger experience”. According to its factsheet, “Passengers will no longer need to juggle between different documents. Passengers will be given an opportunity to share the minimum data necessary from digital identity with airlines, airports and governments prior to departure. Passengers will then arrive at the airport ready to fly in nearly every travel scenario. At the airport, passengers
NDC content gives access to those services that otherwise the end- user has to do, like going to the airline’s website to book a seat. Many companies allow travellers to purchase a seat but you can’t do that at the time of booking. One of the benefits [of NDC] is that at the time of booking you can get the seat all in the same single transaction – and one payment. But I don’t know about the implications when the ticket needs to be changed – we might have some problems then,” he says. Dinu is referring to one of the biggest frustrations travel managers have in differentiating
will not need to present their documents repetitively, and will enjoy contactless travel at all airport touchpoints with biometric recognition.” That evidence of Covid vaccination will no longer have to be retrieved at every stage of the journey, for example. Upheaval in the world of distribution may not be directly altering travel managers’ basic business objectives but the changes are profound enough to influence the profiles of the next generation of travel managers. Areka Consulting’s Jean Michel Kadaner explains: “The skill sets required today for a travel
the consumer purchase from the corporate purchase – the servicing of that booking.
manager are not the same as they were ten years ago. They now need to be tech savvy.” For example, 20 years ago, the biggest challenge around online booking tools was ensuring compliance. Compliance can now be automatically detected but there are new challenges instead. For starters, travel managers today need to be able to work out how to ensure that carbon emissions are reported and sustainability targets are monitored, whether suppliers’ APIs are delivering what they’re meant to, and whether it’s clear what’s packaged into NDC prices and what’s not. “How can a non-geek travel manager do that without IT support?” asks Kadaner. Indeed, expectations are changing.
SERVICING THE BOOKING Service is a core part of the TMC proposition. Its importance becomes evident in business travel. Business trips are much more likely to require itinerary changes than the annual family holiday for which work leave has been booked long in advance. Business trips are also much more likely to be multi-leg and even multi-carrier trips. Travel managers have expressed frustration at the level of service available on NDC bookings. The lack of compatibility of airlines’ APIs through aggregators with legacy GDS systems is often many experts’
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businesstravelnewseurope.com | SPRING 2023
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