Adoption rates for corporate online booking tools moved in only one direction from their introduction in the mid-1990s right up to 2020. But, as with pretty much else everything in life, coronavirus changed all that.
“Many companies put a complete freeze on travel or only allowed it if authorised by their CEO,” says Guy Snelgar, senior vice-president for global travel technology integration with Partnership Travel Consulting. “They locked down their OBTs as part of their travel ban or because the tools were not updated to match where their policy was.”
Mondelez International is a textbook example of Snelgar’s observation. The confectionery and snack food giant switched off its OBT when the virus struck because it doesn’t allow self-service booking to high-risk countries. “With the pandemic by default putting every market in a high-risk country, online booking become a non-choice. It was not a secure way of providing a service,” global lead for travel, expense and card programmes Adrian Witschi said on a recent BTN Europe podcast.
The big question, as with so many disruptions caused by coronavirus, is whether the trend will prove permanent. Snelgar believes firmly that the retreat to offline is not only temporary but has already abated.
“We’ve just reached a turning point in the last couple of weeks,” Snelgar says. “Companies are signalling they are about to open up travel again, albeit in a controlled way, and they want to switch their OBTs back on with new rules.”
Examples of those new rules may include trip approval by a line manager or other internal stakeholders such as human resources, and requirement of confirmation by travellers that they are fully vaccinated.
“As soon as you have rules like that, technology becomes the best way to enforce it,” Snelgar continues. “Technology doesn’t forget you need two jabs or to check you’ve acknowledged you have read the Covid rules for the country you are visiting. Instead of sending travellers a complex set of rules, the tool will tell them what to do.
“All the things OBTs are good at – configuring rules, communicating information and managing approval processes – have become even more important in the post-Covid world. Some organisations are enforcing use of the OBT because that is the guaranteed way to to meet duty of care obligations by showing you have risk-managed every trip.”
Tony D’Astolfo, senior vice-president for North America at Serko, provider of the OBT Zeno, agrees with Snelgar about the resumption of online bookings. “We do have customers who took their sites down to remove all risk of people making a booking while they had travel bans. They have switched them back on,” he says. “We’ve done a lot of work to provide information at the point of purchase to help users make informed booking decisions.”
One company which feels very comfortable booking online is the academic publisher Springer Nature Group. It switched recently to the predominantly digital travel management company TripActions and global travel manager Sammit Khanndeparkar believes the online environment does exactly what Snelgar outlined: steering the appropriate information and policy rules to travellers at point of booking to ensure correct behaviour.
Springer Nature operates a traffic light policy. “If you try to book a country on the red list, the system tells you that you can’t,” Khanndeparkar says. He sits in on a company crisis management call every Monday, after which policy and pre-trip information is adjusted for travellers country by country.
Khanndeparkar says everyone in the company wins. His travellers prefer self-service to picking up a phone, while changes to the booking tool are made by TripActions, and traveller communications are handled by Springer Nature’s internal comms and crisis management teams. “I’m getting more time to strategise,” he says.
Both Khanndeparkar and D’Astolfo also refer to the heavy furloughing and redundancies made by TMCs since March 2020 in response to plunging booking volumes. “Offline service is unreliable at the moment,” says Khanndeparkar.
Another point on which the two agree is that the long-term financial advantages of online booking will help it prevail. “Finance guys have become very comfortable with not paying for their people to travel,” notes D’Astolfo, and therefore as travel resumes they will want to see costs kept as low as possible. Online booking transactions are generally much cheaper than offline. Additionally, Khanndeparkar estimates that the well-established concept of visual guilt, where self-service travellers feel obliged to choose cheaper options, lowers average prices by 8-15 per cent.
But not everyone agrees online is the way ahead – at least not for some time yet. Offering the caveat that his clientbase overwhelmingly comprises small and medium enterprises, Travel Counsellors managing director for corporate travel Kieran Hartwell says not a single one of his customers is booking online currently.
“OBTs lack personalisation,” Hartwell argues. “People want reassurance and there is a lack of trust of what online tools tell them in a dynamic situation where the rules are changing constantly. They want someone to navigate the trip for them every step of the way, from searching to in-trip support.”
Issues travellers want to talk through with their counsellor, Hartwell adds, include visas, travel ban exemptions, vaccinations and testing. “Wanting a human you can speak to in order to navigate all of that is a moment but who knows how long that moment may be?” he says. “Twelve months? Eighteen months?”
Needless to say, D’Astolfo does not agree. “We’ll get a smaller amount of a smaller pie initially but it will snap back pretty quickly and we will eventually gain a larger market share because of a younger demographic that don’t want to talk to people when they book,” he says.
And Snelgar remains confident that anything humans can do to help business travellers book a trip, OBTs can often do better. If they can’t, he advises, it’s usually because the booking tool hasn’t been set up properly. “A large proportion of OBT users are not making the most of the potential for configuration, such as approval processes and rules,” he says. “It’s not because technology can’t do it but because whoever is responsible for configuring the tool is not pulling their finger out.”