TMCs Eager to Flex Tech in 2023

Good news: Nearly 84 percent of travel management companies told BTN they now are sufficiently staffed to meet corporate client needs. Bad news: Nearly 58 percent of travel managers told BTN that contact center technology like SMS messaging and chat remain the most vital area in which TMCs need to invest, suggesting that being able to contact agents and consultants continues to be a challenge.  

Good news? More than half of agencies responding to BTN’s survey indicated these areas have received intensive investment over the past 12 months. Forty-five percent said contact center investments would continue as a top priority over the next 12 months.

Making Contact

Michelle Amos, travel program manager at Smartsheet, wants more technology to help agents and consultants support her travelers. She believes this could take the form of AI tools that help an agent find answers for travelers more quickly. It could also be used by travelers to provide the agent with better information in advance of a call.

Gant Travel CEO Patrick Linnihan said the same. In pursuit of that goal, Gant is looking at how policy systems, more detailed traveler profiles and more sophisticated customer relationship management technology can join with machine learning to provide the traveler a better experience in the contact center environment.

“We are making policy, profiles and an individual’s past travel data all machine readable,” said Linnihan, adding that while consumers already may have this kind of automation available in banking or other customer service environments, travel’s fragmented systems have made it difficult to pull the pieces together into a cohesive system for servicing. That’s changing with better machine learning, and these changes are working to provide better service for all types of travelers.  

“Thirty-six months ago we could not monitor every single interaction through our contact center,” said Linnihan. “Now we can. And this is one of those practical examples of how AI is going to change the world.”

German biotech company Parexel International senior director of procurement and travel Benjamin Park voiced frustration at the lack of automation in travel, compared to other service environments. “TMCs have the benefit of having so much data about the traveler, not just their core profile—all their trips, their behaviors, etc.—but they don’t use that data to display a trip that shows they know the traveler.” Linnihan agreed, and said more agencies are working to do just that, and not just with travelers who are on the road constantly. 

Indeed, infrequent travelers, he said, can pose challenges to agency service because their travel habits and needs are less well-known. Yet, post-pandemic infrequent travelers have returned as a larger piece of the business travel pie—and agencies are starting to get their systems around how to look at them differently. 

With the ability to monitor interactions and organize them into which ones apply to different types of travelers, agency systems in 2023 should be better equipped to build service pathways that respond to the needs of specific traveler types.  

“This has been a big shift over the last five years … to identify the traveler by their attributes and then direct them into the contact center for appropriate car, depending on their persona,” said Linnihan. “With AI monitoring every transaction, we now have the data to build the right insights and we can use that to change our systems.”

NDC Impact: More Resources Needed

AI-augmented agency assistance can’t come fast enough given the increasingly complex travel environment that promises to become even more challenging in the coming months, with demands for non-GDS content aggregation climbing quickly to the top of the priority list for agencies in 2023. 

Over the past 12 months, contact center tech was the most-cited investment among TMCs BTN surveyed. That said, American Airlines’ announcement that it would on April 1 withhold a portion of airfares from traditional agency-valued global distribution channels quickly changed the picture for many TMCs.

“It was a giant ripple in the pond,” according to Linnihan. “AA said, ‘I don’t know what your plans were for ’23, but you’ll have to be ready at the end of the first quarter for our [New Distribution Capability].’ This touches nearly every segment of the company—booking, mid-office, back office, training the agents, new tools—so it went from not really on our top five priorities to the No. 1 project because the fuse was lit by the idea of not having certain fares on April 1.”

Linnihan is a supporter of NDC and believes it is urgent for airlines, agencies and customers to move toward a more sophisticated retailing environment. “While I have concerns about how the timeline has been managed, I believe this change to the distribution model is warranted and appropriate,” he wrote to BTN in an email. 

Other agencies are taking a wait-and-see approach. Over the next 12 months, less than half of agencies BTN surveyed planned to plow investments into NDC-based tech changes. Yet it’s still the most common TMC focus this year, likely because the longer-term impact of not enabling NDC not only threatens access to critical content but also would mean throwing more dollars at manual, human interventions for both booking and servicing. 

According to a number of TMC executives, the short-term impact of NDC will be additional costs, including more staff to handle manual interventions until the tech and automations are truly in place to handle NDC at scale. (Read more on NDC readiness.) 

Data Direction

“Data is the only thing travel managers can use to strategically view their programs,” said Amos. “These tools need to identify cost optimization as well as savings, determine the effectiveness of the travel policy, provide sustainability metrics, highlight the performance of supplier contracts and additional areas of negotiation, and indicate the potential for incorporating new vendors or new technologies into the program.” 

Right now, Amos said, she can download raw data and spend a long time analyzing the numbers, but she wonders why her TMC isn’t doing more with analytics that matter. 

“Why aren’t TMCs leveraging AI to do these things?” she posed. Plus, since we are in the era of machine learning, Amos sees the possibility for enhancements. “I want a tool that doesn’t just tell me the history but also projects the future with recommendations for policy optimization,” that anticipate changing market dynamics, she said.

Half of the TMCs BTN surveyed were investing in data tools to match buyers’ demands for more strategic reporting—not just metrics. CWT, for one, said a focus of its recent $90 million equity raise would be better data insights for travel managers. 

This, said Festive Road principal Lora Ellis, goes to the heart of what most companies really look for from their TMCs—strategic partnership. 

“Buyers want a consultative approach where the TMC really is a partner in building a business plan together, in building an innovation roadmap or a sustainability plan,” Ellis said. Reporting should show the way to achieving those kinds of objectives, so improved intelligence tools enhance the value proposition of a consultative partner. 

Book It, Baby

The most visible piece of TMC technology seen by most travelers is the online booking tool. Yet more often than not, it isn’t developed by the TMC. 

“TMCs effectively use the same few leading global OBTs. If I switch travel agencies but keep the same OBT, my travelers might not even know we have made the change,” said Parexel’s Park. “That means,” he continued, “that in a mature business travel program … [where] 60 to 80 percent of transactions go through the booking tool... [it’s an] experience where the TMC has very little influence. TMCs need to invest in their own online booking tools to get control, or they need to find ways to better manage the OBT experience.” 

Some TMCs are clearly aware that booking technologies are in play—perhaps in ways they haven’t been for a long time. With enhancements required to accommodate NDC, sustainability decisions, remote conferencing options and potentially trip justification integration, booking tools that can provide them may get pluses in requests for proposals, and that doesn’t even consider the push for a better user experience. 

One need only look to Navan (formerly TripActions) for the appeal of a consumer-grade booking experience. A number of Navan clients speaking with BTN on background held up its traveler interface as the primary reason for signing with the provider. There are a number of examples of agencies investing in booking: Flight Centre Travel Group purchased WhereTo in 2020 and leveraged it for a booking tool within its Melon platform in 2021. American Express Global Business Travel offers its Neo platform alongside the Egencia platform it purchased in 2021, which leads with the OBT proposition. CTM owns Lightning.

But all these are big companies. 

“Investment for most TMCs to run and maintain their own global OBT is too heavy a financial lift,” said Park. “They are stuck with existing OBTs, but they need to find better ways to collaborate [and] own the experience of the traveler better.” 

While that may be true, smaller TMCs are in the booking game, too. AmTrav led with its booking tool years ago and has continued to roll out enhancements to accommodate NDC and candidate travel booking tools. ATG Travel, another example, flipped the switch on machine learning-powered Baldwin in late 2021. 

But buyers want more than booking tools; they want them on mobile devices and to include all the available content—or at least they want to know all that content is working behind the scenes. Again, we see the need for Big Data strategies and AI to sort out travel’s complexities.

“Booking air on a mobile app is quite tricky as the screen real estate is small and the content is large,” said Gray Dawes Group COO David Bishop. “A typical New York-London Heathrow search can throw up 1,000-plus permutations. Having an intelligent way or algorithm to filter and present the content is a real must.”  

Amos wants more contextual awareness for the traveler: If a traveler tries to book two trips to Chicago within a week of each other, “the OBT should be able to suggest combining the two,” she said. She also said there is an opportunity to integrate real-time trip justification to determine the “go/no-go” status of a business trip. 

Time to Build from the Ground Up?

Park said that despite what TMCs say and the results of BTN’s survey, TMC tech is fundamentally “broken.” This hearkens back to Linnihan’s observation of how fragmented the travel tech stack has become, and the efforts around contact center and customer-centric systems joining with new technologies that can stitch them altogether. That said, some think more drastic measures are needed to position the TMC tech stack for the future. 

“They need to change the backbone, the part that is the most invisible to the traveler—the mid-office and the back office,” Park said. “Nobody is touching the foundations of their technology and it is preventing innovation.”

Wait, nobody?

Spotnana is a tech-first TMC that has gained $100 million in funding from business travel intelligencia like Concur founder Steve Singh, who has called the Spotnana concept “business travel 3.0.” The company has built a platform on an open API structure, with a focus on one global instance of the technology with real-time reporting and a content source-agnostic philosophy, where GDS content integrates on an even field with non-GDS content. Spotnana is selling this TMC tech infrastructure to others as well.

One TMC putting the Spotnana stack at its core is Solutions Travel, a new venture headed by Mark Walton, who said the platform would deliver “a strong service orientation, real-time data, direct content sources, and other integrated components.” Solutions will white-label the Spotnana platform and integrate it with other systems via open APIs over time, as client needs dictate. 

“People are coming into businesses now who are tech-savvy individuals. They have grown up with technology and they have a certain expectation,” said Walton. “But [corporate travel] has been based on very old architecture and these new folks in the industry, unless they’re getting what they believe is a consumer-grade experience, they’re going to shy away from it.” 

Festive Road’s Ellis said more companies—generally larger ones—are looking at the option of BYO or “Bring Your Own” technology strategies that would include a TMC at the core of the ecosystem. She’s intrigued by Spotnana’s philosophy and by its products, which include a booking tool and all the TMC mid-office and back-office tech as well. Until now, BYO has been more theoretical, but having looked at Spotnana, she said, “I think more companies might consider BYO as a possibility—or some version of it.”

Whether buyers look at their TMC as part of a program ecosystem or as that central travel program partner, the technology the TMC delivers will only become more critical in 2023. 

Bishop believes TMCs have an appetite for increased investment in technology now that they have returned to profitability. That said, they may still be cautious. 

“A lot [of TMCs] are still running on slim staff. While they may have money to invest, tech implementations take time and pull focus from the day job,” he said. “I would hope genuinely that TMCs are focusing on tech that can enhance margins by increasing revenue or reducing cost whilst also delivering a better TMC experience to their clients.”