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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A big chunk of travel customers from the Asia Pacific (APAC) region are leaving their shopping carts at the checkout stage. Exclusive data from advertising and marketing technology company Ve Global (“Ve”), has revealed that on-site abandonment – where a customer fails to complete a booking online – remains a critical factor for the APAC travel industry, with 92% of all bookings lost at the checkout stage.

The findings, taken from over 58 million customer sessions between January 2017 to April 2018, form part of a wider Ve study into online customer journeys in the APAC travel industry. The analysis includes a percentage breakdown of what devices customers are using to complete their online bookings as well as the best, and worst, performing travel sub-sectors for converting customers.

Travel Agents in the region face the biggest struggle to convert customers with 95.5% of them abandoning their online booking. Although performing better, hotels (90.4%), airlines (91.6%) and vehicle hire companies (88.9%), are also failing to convert the majority of would-be bookers at the checkout phase. The most clinical sub-sector in travel was reserved for the more low-cost options, with coach and ferry operators converting 20.2% of active traffic into bookings.

In terms of countries, Australian travel companies do the best job in turning browsers into bookers with a relatively low 82% abandonment rate. At the other end of the scale, Japanese customers looked to be the hardest to convert with 93.76% leaving their online baskets without completing a booking.

While abandonment still plagues the travel industry, the research did find APAC customers were far more receptive to forms of remarketing than their global counterparts. For example, APAC travel companies can expect to recover one online booking for every 18 remarketing emails sent, compared with the 23 that European companies must send out on average.

The data also revealed that customers in APAC complete more online travel bookings using their mobile devices than in any other region globally. The research found that almost a third (30%) of all travel bookings made in the region were completed using either a mobile or tablet device. This compares to 29% of bookings in the United States, 28% in Europe, and just 13% in Latin America.

Jamie Pierre, Managing Director at Ve Global, APAC, said: “Increasingly, APAC travel companies are allocating vast sums of their marketing spend to attracting customers online, only to lose them during the booking process. Although the causes of customer abandonment are varied, travel companies should pay close attention to the growing use of mobile devices in completing bookings and ensure they offer a multi-channel approach that meets the growing expectations of consumers.”

David Marrinan-Hayes, CEO at Ve Global, said: “Despite tenacious customer abandonment rates, there’s a massive opportunity to capitalise on potential bookers already showing a high level of buying intent through effective remarketing. The goal for APAC travel companies should be to anticipate and inspire customer decisions by delivering more relevancy, more context, and to create the right individualised experience at the right time.”

Learn more about the findings here:

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The travel and hospitality sector is rapidly evolving with the rising adoption of various tools, technologies and digital platforms — primarily to improve customer experience, build strong loyalties and run businesses efficiently.

Based on this growth trend, KPMG in India and FICCI released a report titled ‘Expedition 3.0: Travel and hospitality gone digital’ to portray an immersive view on the key trends, challenges and consequences of digital travel.

The study found that following global footsteps, Indian players are also leveraging various tools, technologies and digital platforms; India was projected to have accounted for 3.7% of the global digital travel sales – making it the third-largest market by value in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region.

Image source: Valtech

This uprising of digital travel in India can be attributed to the increasingly digitally-savvy Indian travellers. The online sale of travel bookings — including airlines, hotels, car rentals, cruises, accommodation aggregators and other transportation modes — is expected to have grown 33% in 2017, according to the report. Majority of growth in India’s digital travel is increasingly being led by tier-II and tier-III cities, as digital transactions in these areas rise on the back of increasing penetration of smartphones and the Internet. Moreover, the Indian government’s move to remove high currency notes out of circulation in November 2016 is expected to have further catalysed the growth of digital travel sales in the country during 2017.

The report also states that travel and hospitality is one of the key sectors of the Indian economy, growing at a steady growth with 15.6% year-on-year (y-o-y) rise in foreign tourist arrivals (FTAs) and 20.8% y-o-y growth in foreign exchange earnings (FEEs) during 2017. Estimated to directly contribute to 25.9 million jobs and INR 5,141.1 billion ($75.8 billion) to the GDP of India, it is also one of the largest employment generators.

The report also speaks of the tools and technologies driving this growth and lists mobile applications, social media, Big Data analytics, AI, machine learning, VR, and AR as the biggest contributors. India is also witnessing a growth in technology-driven start-ups in the travel space. These start-ups are influencing the industry with their niche offerings — complementing the traditional players in some ways and disrupting them in others. These players operate across various segments including online travel communities, travel planning, activities and experiences, travel guide services (emphasising on localised and authentic experiences), food delivery (during travel), niche/customised travel packages, digital communication platforms (e.g., for travellers and locals) and online accommodation booking.

The report enlists six key focus areas to win the tech-friendly traveller: Marketing to the modern-day traveller- through Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), following a mobile-first approach, leveraging social media, providing personalised offers and utilising User Generated Content (UGC).

Expedition 3.0 also predicts that with increased adoption of technology, the Indian travel and hospitality sector is expected to see more of innovative solutions and services such as AR city tours, smart tourism, robots for security and housekeeping, smart luggage, radio frequency identification (RFID)/facial recognition technology to open hotel doors, driverless/self-parking cars and air taxis over the foreseeable future.

Read the full report, here.

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An analysis by Lufthansa Innovation Hub found that funding in the first two months of 2018 reached more than $6.5 billion across 76 deals – a pace that could bring a new record by the end of the year.

Startups creating solutions to make travel more efficient, frictionless and interconnected received a record amount of venture capital funding in 2017. At $25.45 billion, it was a substantial 32% increase over investments made in 2016. And the 2018 figure could be even higher.

These early year investments also signal another trend – mega-rounds of more than $100 million are becoming the norm in the travel and mobility technology sector. Most of the money is funneling to late-stage startups rather than angel and seed-funding rounds.

Of the $6.5 billion invested through February 28, the majority of it went to just eight companies, including Singapore-based ride hailing company Grab ($2.5 billion), Indonesian ride-hailing and payment company Go-Jek ($1.5 billion), Uber ($1.25 billion) and Cabify ($160 million).

In a blog post, Lufthansa Innovation Hub trend and market research analyst Lennart Dobravsky wrote, “For Travel & Mobility Tech, this likely means that the average number of 200 new startups, which we have seen raising their initial funding on an annual basis since 2010, will likely slow down significantly in 2018 while more established and hyped startups will continue to close deals at unprecedented amounts.”

Investors are showing increasing preference for travel and mobility tech startups based in China and India. In 2017, 70% of global venture capital funding went to companies based in one of those two countries, while just 23% went to companies based in the United States and 3% to Europe.

That’s a dramatic change from just three years earlier when Chinese and Indian companies attracted just 14% of the total funding for the year, and 68% went to US-based startups. Additionally, 12 of the world’s 22 most valuable travel and mobility startups are from Asia.

Dobravsky says Asia’s ride-hailing services will continue to be attractive to investors since they have potential for continued growth. Chinese ride-hailing app Didi Chuxing, currently valued at $56 billion, provides 25 million rides a day, which is about twice as many as Uber and all other global ride-sharing apps combined. With a population of nearly 4.5 billion on the continent, Didi Chuxing still has a massive untapped audience.

Dobravsky cites electric vehicle startups as another sector to watch, primarily in China where much of the electric batteries are manufactured.

Lufthansa Innovation Hub based its analysis on its own database of about 2,500 travel tech startups both B2B and B2C – ranging from those offering online search and booking to transportation providers and niche segments such as virtual assistants and travel-related data analytics. It tracks venture capital raised by these startups using data from PitchBook.

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Travel market is growing year over year with an expansive viewpoint that doesn’t leave any platform under the rock. The entire tourism industry knows the power of social media and how this could leverage travel marketing and conversions in their favour. Consumers have increasingly turned to mobile to get itinerary ideas, compare flight fares, or reserve experiences.

To dig more into this, Google Internal Data partnered with Sojern International, a global performance marketing engine for travel brands and built a complete path-to-purchase trend. ‘Micro-moments’, as they’d like to call it, is a term defined by Google analysts where a well-positioned brand can define a consumer’s behaviour through his decision patterns and choices he makes online. They analysed booking data from 350 anonymous traveller profiles and came to an exceptional outlook at traveller’s journey across video, online and mobile platforms.

Where are the people heading: Emerging spots this year

You Tube has come out to be on top of the list for people to get their travel inspirations and ideas. These media platforms are great at gauging people’s interest and purchase intent. The handful of destinations that rose in the first half of this year as the rising searches are:

1. Reykjavik
2. Havana
3. Toronto
4. Mexico City
5. Tokyo

Travel hacks and You Tube goes hand-in-hand

Travellers just don’t want to get their inspirations right but also their trip right. The experience that they’ve craved for should be made sure that it’s worth. And they get this right by hopping from one video to another that probably talks about tips to stay hydrated on a flight or perhaps how to minimise jet lag.

According to the data studied, travel hacks got searched on You Tube with an 115% increase over last year with a maximum influx from mobile devices. In a similar fashion, search interest went up by 16 times, hitting an all time hit in July in four years.

Mobile for research and desktop for booking

The mobile platform has been extensively used for researching whereas the desktop predominates the purchase market. Weekend searches with respect to travel on mobile outpace the desktop. And interestingly, destinations peak up on Tuesdays. Mobile searches help the brand stay top-of-mind when traveller starts thinking purchase.

Travellers use mobile to be spontaneous

Smartphones are the on-ground research tools for leisure travellers. Mobile allows travellers to be spontaneous once they reach the destination. 85% o f leisure travellers decide on their activities after reaching their destination. 50% of international travellers use a smartphone to look for things at their arrival.

India has a huge potential of becoming a ground breaking tourism market. It has a growing number of smart phone users and the millennial population is travelling with more experiential streak within them. This report comes as breath-of-fresh-air for the prospects the travel and tourism market has in store for the marketers.

Travel marketers need to evolve with the ongoing trends and as it is clearly visible, You Tube is the new search engine for the millennial. To know more about this report published last month, log on to thinkwithgoogle.com.

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The year 2015 offered amazing growth opportunities for the travel ecosystem. We saw some really interesting trends emerge in the industry and riding on the wave of these trends, many innovative travel startups entered the landscape. As we approach 2016, we have made an attempt to identify the forces that will drive the travel industry forward.

We have collated the thoughts of experts from different verticals in travel to highlight the trends that they foresee.

The report includes:

• Insights of key experts from more than 8 countries
• Contributions from Alitrip, Amadeus, Concur Technologies and more
• Holistic overview of mobile, social media and M&A opportunities
• Global Trends from OTAs, Hospitality & Destination Marketing Industry

You can download the free report Top Trends of Travel in 2016

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