Buyers, do you have your mobile strategy? Remember – Phat Data comes from many sources
Perhaps the biggest stone left unturned in the hunt for Phat Data is your travelers’ mobile communication and social media presence. How can your program benefit from these data gold mines, and how can you tap into them?
Having a mobile strategy for your travel program is a must-do. And if you aren’t already working on it, start now. The utilization of mobile platforms continues to grow in the business travel space with more and more travelers wanting to book and interact with their travel plans through smartphones, tablets and other devices. So how does Phat Data really fit into this?
If you have deployed a set of apps for your travelers to use, today those providers should have the capability to give you some statistical insights into how the travelers are using the app(s). For example, if travelers are using an app to book travel, are they searching or actually making bookings on the app? If they’re searching, what are they most commonly looking for? If they’re booking, what are they booking? How far in advance?
Information like this can then help the travel buyer better understand their travelers’ behavior. This helps to drive the mobile strategy. What is working? What do the traveler use it for? How can you and your mobile partners deliver an enhanced experience for your travelers?
So we have some great information at our fingertips today, but the real opportunities come when we start fielding artificial intelligence and chatbots. Don’t have a clue what those are? Think of it as Siri on steroids. There are many TMC’s that are entering into the market with mobile applications that are using these technologies to create a better travel experience.
Let’s say you need to book a hotel; you can open the app and text that you need to book a hotel for your upcoming trip, and then through a text conversation your hotel is booked for you via automation. That is it in the simplest form.
Getting to Know All About You
But it doesn’t stop there; over time machines learn more and more about your travelers and their preferences and are able to apply your corporate policy. Eventually they’ll be able to literally deliver the perfect trip without the traveler – or you – ever picking up a phone.
It is unlikely that artificial intelligence will take over the job of an agent, because there’s still plenty of human intervention required. The technology will never be perfect (how many times have you asked your phone something and it gives you some crazy unrelated answer?), but it certainly redesigns the experience. It also creates a whole new layer of Phat Data that can be used to enhance the managed travel program even more.
“The analytics that come from the interactions that a traveler has with their mobile platforms,” notes Travis Harper, vice president of sales for Travel Leaders, “give travel managers and travel management companies a deeper insight into the behaviors of the individual travelers. Hence they are able to provide a more customized offering.”
In addition to better understanding traveler behavior, we can discover more about the ‘conversion rate’ within mobile applications – that is, the rate at which travelers search for something and then take action on what they find, like making a booking. By paying attention to this information, we can then apply it back into areas of our managed travel program.
“Mobile offers so much opportunity to turn usage data into program analytics that can both drive cost savings and improve the traveler experience," according to Harper.
Think about cost savings: If a traveler can have an improved interactive experience and book more trips via chat and not an online booking tool or agent, there should be less cost in doing so. If you are trying to drive hotel attachment, why not have the mobile app ask your traveler, “I see you have booked flights for your upcoming trip to San Francisco, shall I book a hotel for you?”
Start with the End in Mind
The opportunities are endless, and the more we focus on artificial intelligence to garner a better understanding of our travelers, the more enhancements we can bring to our programs and the better the traveler experience will be.
To date, we have many mobile apps available to us, either through our travel management companies or third party providers. What the travel buyer needs to consider is what their end goals are and which application will help them get there fastest. For example if a buyer wants to focus on providing real time feedback to a traveler during their trip, whether it is around trip disruption or policy reminders, they should look for a provider that offers proactive messaging. Other buyers may be focused on improving their duty of care and risk management considerations. Let’s face it – we don’t really know where every traveler is, but the GPS in their phone does!
So as a buyer you should focus on the important deliverables for your mobile strategy and make sure that you can extrapolate the data from the app you need to support your initiatives.
When it comes to mobile, we have lots of amazing technology at our fingertips today, but these technologies are going to continue to expand. “In the next 18 months we will see the utilization of artificial intelligence and chatbots increasing,” Harper predicts. “The ability for travel management companies to reach travelers immediately at their time of need should help to increase program compliance and reduce traveler stress. Within the next five years machine learning will bring a more proactive booking experience. For example, on a traveler’s calendar there is a trip to visit a client in Palo Alto when a traveler needs to book a trip. The technology can read their calendar and say something like, ‘I see you are going to Palo Alto, do you want me to book the same itinerary as your last trip to visit client XYZ?’"
If you think about calendar integration, imagine what amazing things it can do by way of forecasting travel costs – how much you can influence a traveler and tell them when to book their trip and have the bot do it all for them.
There is a wide, wide world of opportunity in business travel. And as travel buyers we need to stay focused on the impact that these technologies will have to take the power from one of the things we treasure most, our phones, and turn that power into Phat Data, driven by a Phat experience for our travelers.