Tell your stories

Clive Wratten, CEO of the Business Travel Association, urged travel management company leaders to share stories of the work their teams are doing to look after travellers caught up in the Middle East travel disruption.

“There is never a better opportunity for all of you out there to stand up and tell the stories about what you do, because that has impact,” he told TMCs in the audience.

“If you guys are out there sharing some of the stuff that’s been going on over last week, it would really help us get the message through to the Government of the vital role we play. Because there are two things that government listen to – one is emotion, and the second is data, and we have both. We need to use it.

“There’s been no reaching out to the business travel community from the Government in the current Middle East crisis, even though the people in this room are evacuating more people than the Government will ever evacuate. It’s frustrating that this particular administration is even more difficult to engage with. They just don’t understand how important the business travel industry is to the economy, nor to the national psyche.”

Julia Lo Bue-Said, CEO at Advantage Travel Partnership, said she believes the crisis is yet another situation where travel agents can demonstrate their value, but it should also be an opportunity to learn how to do things better when the next crisis hits.

“We really are working blind when it comes to the Government. The communication with Government is pretty much non-existent, and makes the whole thing even more challenging,” she said.

Do you approve?

Analysis by Direct Travel shows only around 5% of trips that go for approval are declined.

Nikki Regan, the TMC’s Director of Commercial Strategy, shared the statistic with the conference audience to demonstrate the amount of time and resources taken up by pre-trip approvals.

If 5% are declined, this means 95% are approved, which is arguably time spent better elsewhere.

She said during the Covid pandemic, the approval process was tightened up. “We’ve only just started to get to where people were being more sensible about it. What I really hope is that, with the situation in last couple of weeks, everyone doesn’t panic and go back to where we were, where everything has to get approved,” she said.

“I think approval is something that we should be looking at and making sure that it’s valid. Is it approval because of cost? Is it approval because you’re going to a risk area, which is absolutely viable, or is it approval because the budget holder just wants to see what you’re doing?”

She said travellers should be trusted. “Travellers don’t very often want to do something wrong,” she argued.

“They will comply. They want to travel with purpose, they want to do it in policy and be a good citizen, and get a return on that investment. They want to know that they’ve gone and done that deal, or they’ve completed that training, and feel invested in. Let’s not go back to where we were post Covid.”

Free flow

Lara Maughan, IATA Area Manager UK and Ireland, said the move to SAF is not just to help decarbonise the aviation industry, it’s also to protect airlines from the impact of restrictions on fuel supply into Europe.

“While other sectors are perhaps able to accommodate working patterns or working from home patterns to try and get through this, the aviation industry is obviously pretty useless without its flow of fuel. So, for us, the impact on the flow of fuel from the Middle East crisis is a really a critical issue, and the substitution of kerosene jet fuel at the moment at scale, is not happening.

“We need to move into this era of alternative fuels so that we have some security around our exposure to these markets and future crises.”

She said although last year the UK managed to hit the SAF mandate, the rate of growth is slowing and the aviation sector is starting to believe that the target of 10% by 2030 inthe UK will become increasingly challenging to hit in the current situation.

“The sector has always been well aware and comfortable with the fact that SAF is going to cost a premium, but it’s the right thing to do, and we’re moving down that path of decarbonising the sector. What we’ve seen, however, is a market where the suppliers are shifting all of the price and the risk onto the airlines, which ultimately means the passengers are paying. And in the UK, unfortunately, we’ve seen the highest prices globally for SAF and that’s absolutely front of mind for the industry.”

Status levels

Traveller behaviour can be strongly influenced by loyalty schemes and managers need to take this into consideration, according to a panel discussion.

Melissa Watson, VP Global Housing, Travel and Events, Informa, told the summit audience that employees have requested trips at certain times purely to climb tier status in their airline reward schemes.

“A couple of weeks ago a colleague said to me, ‘Look there is a trick I need to do. If I travel his month, I’m going to meet my tier status, or should I do the trip in June?’,” she said.

After checking data, Watson realised that trips using one particular supplier had spiked in a particular time period, presumably due to a tier renewal.

“So in those instances, we are going out to the business and going out to the teams and saying, ‘Look, this is what the data is showing us’. It may be fully justified, but we need to look at why this is, why this is happening, how it’s happening, and is there a need for it, and really get those individual teams to look into it.

“So I think the data received for us is crucial, and being aware to ask or start to look at things like that. Because a year or two ago, this may not been an issue, but due to changes in the industry, all of a sudden I’ve got to be an expert on that now.

“It’s like – if anyone’s got children in the room – just when you think you’ve mastered the art of parenthood, something else comes along. As these changes come into play, we really just have to adjust and look at new data points and see what the data is showing us, and take action.”

Data awareness

Paul Bowden, Commercial Director at the Rail Delivery Group, urged TMCs to make use of the rail sustainability data that’s been made freely available.

“The rail industry has invested a huge amount of time, effort and resource to collate and provide carbon emissions data, which covers the majority of routes, and make that available so it can be absorbed and ingested by corporate TMCs, online booking tools and suppliers,” he said.

“But adoption isn’t as high as we’d like to see it. I’d love to talk to anyone after this event about how we can increase the take-up of the data, which was made available as open data.

“Yes, I agree that in the past rail data was difficult to access and relied on knowledge – and the understanding of a lot of acronyms – and it hasn’t always been open data. But we’ve taken the approach to make this fully open data and we’ve made that available to help inform choices, so that the traveller or the corporate can change their policy or have more information presented.”