“We sit in an ecosystem and in the middle of that ecosystem is the traveller,” Amadeus IT Pacific MD Tony Carter said at the recent Travel DAZE conference, emphasising just how important understanding the modern day traveller is for a good travel agent.
“And the biggest disruptors are the traveller themselves. The biggest change is around consumers and what they’re prepared to do.”
Speaking to the crowd at the Sydney event, Carter said the mobile has changed travel in the biggest ways possible, and that it couldn’t just be ignored.
“Mobile is certainly an enabler, and right now with mobile phones and the Internet, travellers are connected 24/7,” he explained.
“They have access to more information than ever before and they expect their travel agent to have that knowledge at their fingertips.
“Travellers have evolved, and no longer is managed travel or business travel a perk, it’s almost become a right. Employees expect to travel.”
Last year, Amadeus did a white paper on Traveller Tribes, and one of these tribes was the ‘business traveller’.
“One of the things this group said was that they would not work for a company where they didn’t travel,” Carter said. “They will seek out a company where they can travel.”
“We have just launched a White Paper called ‘Managed Travel 3.0’ and these are the spaces where we think travel is evolving: Content, Search, My Trip, and Service.”
In the content field, Carter said things like private inventory, ancillaries, user generated content and peer-to-peer services were important to today’s traveller.
In search, it was about door-to-door service, and end-to-end processing, with things like pre-trip approval, on-trip activity and expense management on return essential.
My Trip looked at things like single repository. Carter said, ““Most business travellers today travel with three devices and expect to be able to use any of those three and have access to all of their booking information.”
And finally, Service was all about a duty of care that travel agents have for their clients.
“We can see there is a lot more value agents can offer to travellers, based on these findings,” Carter concluded.
