October 08, 2009 • Austin, Texas - Following years of
tightly managed travel programs and mandated vendor use, speakers here last month at The Beat
Live predicted a future in which travel managers "become very good influencers and let go of that need to always be in control," according to Pegasus Solutions chief marketing officer Ric Leutwyler.
The "traveler-centric future" is emerging, according to TripIt co-founder and president Gregg Brockway, with the convergence of "three key trends of mobility, social networking and interoperability of services."
Individually, "each of these is a huge opportunity, but it's really as these things start to come together that things get interesting," Brockway said. Equipped with smartphones that can "capture the Internet on a handset" and services that "are starting to talk to each other and engage with each other," the traveler becomes really powerful, and the whole architecture starts to realign around the traveler. The traveler is the ultimate decider.
"Mobile is changing how people behave," and social networking is changing behaviors even more so, Brockway said. "For those just getting used to the concept of a social network--Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and all these things--I've got some bad news: The game is about to change in a really fundamental way. Your social network is starting to become portable, and you can take it around with you as you cruise the Internet." Brockway pointed to restaurant review site Urbanspoon's feature allowing users to overlay their Facebook network to see only "my network's restaurant recommendations."
Meanwhile, interoperability means "applications are starting to talk to each other up in the cloud on our behalf without us being involved," Brockway said. "It used to be that the Internet was an incredible resource for people, but all the content out there was really invisible to machines. They couldn't read it, understand it. That's starting to change."
Benefits Of Interoperability
"Lots of mobile apps, social networking and expense reporting solutions are starting to interact with TripIt data," Brockway noted. To illustrate the impact of such interoperability, Brockway showed a map that pinpointed where all of a company's travelers were in the world, generated by overlaying itinerary data with a social network or database. Today, TripIt and LinkedIn overlays identify "Who's close?" or network contacts who are traveling in close proximity.
Such interoperability would solve a problem identified by another speaker, Brockway said, "of seven people who arrive at an airport and take separate limos to the same destination. With 'Who's close?' that becomes a lot harder to justify." Limo drivers and passengers could use such tools to find each other in those situations, he added.
It also makes travelers "much more productive," as every hotel lobby, coffee shop or airport becomes a networking opportunity. Brockway suggested that airlines could monetize the trend by matching proximity with an understanding of a traveler's profile and interests to "sell a new class of seat: social seats for $30 you can pay to sit next to someone interesting." Hotels also could use the converged services to allow concierges to book restaurants or spa services that better align with personal preferences.
Bots Enforce Compliance?
At the booking stage, Brockway said, "a company bot can talk to the personal bot and know what's in plan, out of plan and what may be a new way to enforce compliance."
When there are travel delays, the personal bot could "search alternatives, reschedule meetings, flights, my limo and let my wife know I won't be home for dinner," Brockway said of the potential.
Travelers also could rely on their bots to protect and manage their profiles with other service providers to enhance the travel experience, market offers and "run interference" to prevent information overload.
"It will create opportunities for everybody in this room," Brockway told the mixed crowd of suppliers, buyers and intermediaries. "The only limitation is our imagination and the speed at which we can put this into practice."
A New Face Of Privacy
With TripIt's open application programming interface, Brockway said, "you don't need our permission" to add to or extract data from the itinerary. "You need the traveler's permission to get the data."
Wellpoint travel sourcing manager Cindy Heston noted that by engaging travelers, Brockway essentially created the "super PNR" that so many travel buyers had been "spinning our wheels" to forge.
"How can travel managers engage travelers to not only participate, but agree to share their data so buyers can make their experience better and give [managers] more knowledge about what they're doing, yet not invade their privacy? By allowing the traveler to opt to participate to gain value," Brockway said.
BCD Travel senior vice president of strategic marketing and technology planning
April Bridgeman said "each traveler will have to opt in to let us have their info."
BCD and TripIt by early next year plan to enroll BCD clients in enterprise implementations of TripIt's online itinerary service, which has mainly been marketed individually to travelers. TripIt's service enables travelers to email itinerary confirmations for travel services booked with hundreds of sites and automatically builds a consolidated online trip plan complemented by maps, weather forecasts and driving directions. The new arrangement will allow BCD Travel to feed those plans directly into TripIt for joint users. The partnership also will provide negotiated pricing on TripIt Pro, a relatively new fee-based service that offers flight alternatives, gate information, bag locations, loyalty program tracking and trip sharing.
Bridgeman said BCD and client travel managers will only get reporting info back from those who opt in, "but it's better than what you have today."
Brockway said TripIt gets "tons of comments every day--almost all related to privacy and security are going the other way." Users have requested that TripIt make it even easier to share all itinerary data, including pricing and confirmations, which Brockway conceded he isn't comfortable doing. "What I think the right thing to do is give the individual the degree of control to share information if they want.
"As these things start to happen, as service providers start to compete more directly along the dimensions of efficiency, the traveler is the ultimate beneficiary," Brockway added. "The in-trip experience is going to get a lot better because my bot is always going to be able to use these predictive indicators."
As The Roles Change
"Those are some of the many factors influencing travelers that are creating this groundswell for travel managers, for TMCs, for suppliers to possibly think how we recapture that knowledge and how we basically harness it to drive the objectives of a travel program in ways we have never done before," Bridgeman told the audience.
For Wellpoint's Heston, this future means "we should focus more on the end user and less on what we think we need to have to manage a travel program. From a control standpoint, you are not going to have the control anymore, so why not have something that's so cool or interesting to that traveler so they would want to participate?"
Such trends also increase pressures on travel managers to better market their programs and push suppliers to deliver deals they can sell, Heston said: "I am more of an internal consultant to my organization, and I should be marketing value, not price." Airlines have increasingly made their deals about price, rather than value, she argued. "If [airlines] made their deals more about value and looked at the end-to-end trip where all the price components are in that trip," she said, she "could market that internally as a value add."
Related resource:
Extended excerpts of Gregg Brockway's speech.
~ Lauren Darson contributed to this article
