Improved expense experience, collaboration, and sustainability top of corporate travel agenda

April 23, 2024

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Having regained its equilibrium, the business travel sector has now turned its attention to balancing employee and traveler experience against addressing corporate environmental, social and governance (ESG) goals.

New technologies are reshaping many elements of the journey, from reducing the burden of expense claims to driving collaboration and offering additional visibility over sustainability metrics.

Our new research –Travel Technology Investment Trends 2024 – explores this changing landscape in detail, speaking with 500 senior decision makers with corporate travel responsibilities across ten key markets.

The findings – explored in a new report – confirm an eagerness to invest in order to drive change.

Investment opportunities

In the study we learned that two thirds of agents across the world are planning concerted investment in technologyOverall, corporate travel managers are planning to invest 13% more in travel technology in 2024 than they did last year – an encouraging sign that change is coming.

So, where is this money going?

Paying for expenses with personal money and reclaiming from the business was cited as a top concern for travel managers. Not a surprise either to see the cost of auditing expenses in addition to the productivity lost by manual claims and difficulty in identifying fraud, being top of mind.

Today, there is a growing awareness that new technology can provide a much more effective and employee-friendly solution. Our research found that more than half (52%) of corporate travel managers are currently investing to better control the expense process. Big agenda items for close to one in two corporations (cited by 48% of those interviewed) include deploying technology which fosters paid-by-company like virtual payment, avoiding out of pocket expense for travelers, as well as working to better integrate expense management technology with internal systems.

Sustainable travel

Cited by 64% of corporate travel managers, another key investment area over the coming 12 months when it comes to travel investment is in ‘helping the company meet its sustainability goals’.

New technology will again drive change in this area, in its simplest form we can anticipate more options for sustainable travel using data to define clear CO2-reduction objectives. Initiatives include:
> the possibility to purchase sustainable aviation fuel,
> giving the control to travelers for carbon budget decisions,
> enabling or enforcing sustainable policies with transportation alternatives to flights,
> rail side-by-side comparison,
> selection of hybrid or electric car rentals,
> and gamification to incentivize and encourage more sustainable choices among employees.

Other areas of focus will be optimizing CO2 emissions thanks to sharing capabilities, such as transfers, removal of paper from expenses. There is a lot is happening in this space, change is coming rapidly, and one area of real excitement is the tangible impact technology can have around more sustainable travel.

Where do you place your bet - AI, metaverse or digital payments?

As part of our research, corporate travel managers were asked to choose which technology they considered the most important to the management of travel and expenses over a one- and five-year horizon.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and/or Machine Learning were considered the most important in both the short- and medium-term from a shortlist of options. Digitalization and digital payments are expected to make an impact in the near future.

With the cost of travel increasing , and the drive for more sustainable and informed decisions, there is a renewed interest in anticipating the role extended reality or the metaverse could play in the business travel space in the coming years.

The real question in my mind is going to be about the tradeoffs: balancing the needs of the business against the interests of employees, the role of wellbeing versus sustainability targets, physical versus virtual collaboration.

Amadeus Cytric Solutions have been developed to address all of these and more. Offering an end-to-end digital spend management experience,Cytric Easy in collaboration with Microsoft has been designed to address these top-of-agenda goals. Integrated into the workspace application Microsoft Teams, Cytric Easy offers a reinvented approach for corporations worldwide based on collaboration and innovation, digitally transforming the way travel is booked and managed.

Our bet is on a more sustainable, more connected future of travel.

For more insights on how corporations are thinking about travel technology, here is the link to the full report:

Corporations report

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