In the past, dedicated teams for travel management were only for large groups. Today, even small and medium sized enterprises (SME) are dedicating resources to managing their travel and place importance on traveller satisfaction as a crucial lever for increasing compliance and enlarging return on investment in travel spend, Egencia findings show. SME buyers are now more focused on adding value to the business by saving money, managing travel expenses and understanding travel patterns.

Egnecia is technology platform for travel management companies which simplifies the process of planning, booking and managing business travel.

“They expect detailed reports, thorough cost analyses and well documented returns on what they spend on their travel activities. Previously, SMEs may not have had access to the same amount of data as larger corporations because it required implementation of expensive software. Today we provide easy-to-use comprehensive tools that let them look at the data and use it to make the necessary changes,” said Virginie Pouget, Head of Global Consulting, Egencia.

In December 2017, Egencia asked a selection of its SME clients to share their focus areas for 2018. 85% said that “increased cost savings” were one of the three most important areas for the year ahead. Of those, 60% believed it is the most important. The other top two areas are both closely linked to efficiency, with “increased productivity for the traveller” at 50%, and “improved transparency on travel expenses” at 40%.

Image source: PYMNTS.com

Traditionally, buyers have focused on improving or expanding travel policy, improving risk management and refining hotel and airline agreements. In 2018, these factors have moved further down the list.

Today, travel purchasers and travel managers are often integrated into the finance or purchasing department, where their main task is to handle travel policy and traveller safety, support policy compliance and manage travel expenses.

“Even though they now report to finance or procurement, it’s important that we, as their travel advisors, understand that the quality of the travel experience is closely linked to controlling the costs. Travel administration is about understanding the human factor,” said Pouget.

Those who travel often have strong and legitimate opinions about which airline they want to fly with and which hotel they want to stay in. To many, this is crucial to how effective they believe they are when they work.

“The buyer needs to understand this and handle both the culture of the company and the staff. Otherwise, cost-saving initiatives could be met with resistance and potentially affect the bottom line negatively,” said Pouget.

At the same time, technology is developing fast in the travel industry. But it does not need to be a contradiction between cutting costs and improving the experience of the travellers. By using today’s technological solutions, travel managers can make sure that the experience benefits both the business and those who travel.

“Booking a business trip should be just as simple as it is to book your weekend getaway. Today’s best sites for business travel offer just that. And in addition, the company gets all the data the leisure travel sites will not give you. Needless to say, the process must be equally smooth when the traveller is on the go on her mobile phone,” said Pouget.

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Corporate travel has been taking its own sweet time to modernize. While consumer travel has evolved with a demanding customer base, business travel still seems to be stuck with legacy issues. More than 90% of the market is still being served offline via a complex maze of travel desks, travel management companies and corporate travel managers. Multiple email exchanges between the travel desk, the human resources team, and an employee makes travel cumbersome.

Here steps in Insteract Technologies, a cloud-based platform, which offers a transparent and convenient way to buy business travel for SMEs. The Bengaluru-based company, founded in July 2015 by three friends – Anandkumar Chandran, Kiran Balimane, and Balaji Ramakrishnan – offers personalised, relevant, and cost-effective travel options to the business traveller by comparing and sourcing lowest relevant options from the market, as per a traveller’s preferences and business rule.

The idea for the business came when the founders were working at Verchaska (Balaji Ramakrishnan’s first venture), which was building legacy software, on-premise solutions, for the global travel industry. They quit the company in 2015, and started Insteract. The three co-founders seeded the company with $250,000 and began to build a product that centralises a company’s travel data, and provides analytics, benchmarking, and guidance to influence employees to make better travel decisions that save money, and comply with their company’s travel policy. The product was launched in January 2016, and went live with 45 corporate customers. Since then, Insteract has acquired 400 clients.

Insteract aims to make travel planning smart and transparent for businesses. The company’s ‘intelligent travel agent’ Hellolosa provides the end user with a real-time cost range produced by data analytics that track fares through real-time benchmarking of market. All options are benchmarked with the lowest logical market fare so customers get a clear picture of what they are buying. Insteract shows the top seven logical options to choose from. It’s unique profiling algorithm evaluates each available option through numerous travel parameters that match with the behaviour of traveller with the company policy. Some of the options are exclusive to them and offer the best value.

Price cap and benchmarks are tagged to each trip request and can be viewed at any time by everyone involved in the workflow. The customer can configure workflows based on spend limits and job titles for teams of any size across the company across any locations.

At the core of Insteract lies the aim to improve the effectiveness of travel programmes. Insteract identifies insights into points of friction between a traveller and travel policy and gives recommendations to optimise travel cost. It provides an absolute and relative comparisons between the traveller behaviour and booking patterns so companies can assess where they stand in comparison to industry benchmarks.

Our take –

The party is just getting started in this space. Business travel has immense potential to become automated, more than leisure travel, because it is a more frequent activity. Corporates are finally starting to look for tools that will virtualise their travel desk function. Here, products like the one by Insteract, can deliver and improve on travel services, thanks to AI and machine learning. It will be pretty exciting to see how the company takes this forward by partnering with different elements of the travel industry, and make a dent in the legacy software business as well.

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