The new reality of business travel connections

April 4, 2022

4 min read

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Remote working, hybrid connections, digital nomads, sustainability... these are just some of the expectations and new challenges many corporate buyers, HR departments and CFOs are facing in today’s world. Bringing together corporations from all over the globe, together, we addressed this and much more in the new world of corporate travel at our annual customer event, IGNITE22.

This year’s IGNITE event echoed the trends we are seeing in corporate travel - hybrid connections, virtual meetings, sustainable choices, and digital nomads. My key takeaway from the event is that we are indeed living in an increasingly hybrid world and workplace, there is a profound need to re-imagine the way we do things, from collaboration to connections. However, with some simple changes and the right choices, you can expect the right balance between ROI, employee and stakeholder engagement, not to mention innovation. In today’s world, creating a smart and connected corporate travel ecosystem is the way to go.

At IGNITE22 we announced our new solution to address this through Cytric by Amadeus. Thanks to our strategic partnership with Microsoft, we have created an essential pillar that will help make this seamless travel ecosystem a reality –Cytric Easy . By embedding our online booking and expense management tool, Cytric Travel & Expense in the Microsoft Modern Workplace, we enable and engage users to plan trips and share travel details with colleagues without ever leaving their day-to-day applicationssuch as Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Calendar or Microsoft Teams. We believe this to be a true game-changer, and only the tip of the iceberg of our collaboration with Microsoft.

Here are some of the key trends I expect to hear more about in the coming year.

1. Simplification for hybrid working

With corporations and teams increasingly collaborating online, expect travel and the processes around booking and expensing to be simplified and become an automatic extension of the travellers working environment. Already two years ago, in asurvey that Amadeus conducted with Forrester Consulting, we identified that only 60% of corporations using cloud solutions had a fully integrated web-based T&E solution and over 20% of corporations still using spreadsheet-based solutions for T&E. Fast forward this to today’s environment with hybrid working, digital nomads and the work from anywhere population, digital transformation is a must. From employee engagement and satisfaction, to improved processes, everyone set to gain.

2. Continuation of digital transformation

Digital touchpoints must come together to provide an end-to-end trip experience. To understand the value and productivity gains an end-to-end T&E digital experience can deliver, let’s just look at the example of expense reporting. Anothersurveywe carried out in 2021, highlighted that it takes on average 2.3 hours for business travelers to fill in an expense report, and it can go up to half a day for 10% of them. Again, expense reporting is just a small part of the overall effort - if you add the time to book travel, manager approvals, and time needed by finance teams to process the statement and reimburse the traveler, we reach a figure of 13.6 hours per trip. Multiply this by the number of business trips your company has on a yearly basis, and you get the potential efficiency savings not to mention sustainability gains that could be generated by digitalizing this process.

3. Virtual payments

The digital future will call on mobile virtual payments, which will be able to integrate policy check at the exact same time of purchase. Combining this with certified scanning and digital archiving of receipts and automated claim creation, this will not only create an end-to-end digital experience, but completely remove the risk of out-of-policy claim for the corporation and the hassle of expense reporting for the traveler.

4. Sustainability, sustainability, sustainability

The importance of sustainability cannot be underestimated. We could not leave the event without talking about this topic. While pre COVID-19, travellers were keen to explore sustainable options of travel, post pandemic, sustainability is no longer a nice to have. At least 22% of the TMCs from our survey say a sustainable travel offering will be a priority for business travellers, and we expect this to only increase with time – that means the onus is on corporations to provide such services and options to its employees. This includes emission friendly ways to travel such as rail, eco-friendly hotels, off-setting carbon footprint, tracking of SAF, and giving back amongst other activities.

At Amadeus, we are acutely aware of these trends. We are creating a future today where you can determine easily whether a trip should take place or not, taking into account the need and interest for collaboration, sustainability goals, employee engagement, stakeholder value and overall value creation.

Come experience the future of business travel with us.

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