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New entrants / TMCs<br />
Making it<br />
click<br />
A breed of new technology-based travel management<br />
platforms are shaking up the global business travel market,<br />
writes Rob Gill<br />
<strong>The</strong> user experience of online<br />
booking tools provided by<br />
traditional travel management<br />
companies has long been a bugbear of<br />
both buyers and travellers, with a<br />
typical comment being: 'why can’t these<br />
tools be as easy to use as consumer<br />
travel sites?'<br />
Quite reasonably, TMCs usually reply that<br />
their online booking tools are doing a lot<br />
more complex work than a consumer<br />
booking platform. This includes giving<br />
travellers access to negotiated rates with<br />
preferred suppliers, adding travel policy<br />
requirements and offering tracking abilities<br />
to improve duty-of-care. But TMCs are<br />
now facing renewed pressure from a new<br />
breed of technology-orientated business<br />
travel specialists – including <strong>Travel</strong>Perk,<br />
TripActions and Lola – who are well funded<br />
and are already making inroads into the<br />
corporate market, particularly at the SME<br />
end of the spectrum.<br />
User experience, or UX as it is often<br />
called these days, is everything to these<br />
new entrants and the chief selling points<br />
for their platforms are their ease of use<br />
and access to a wider range of travel<br />
suppliers. This is also backed up by<br />
customer support services for travellers<br />
and providing the capabilities buyers are<br />
looking for, such as the inclusion of their<br />
travel policies, approvals processes,<br />
invoicing, tracking and reporting.<br />
<br />
THEBUSINESSTRAVELMAG.com<br />
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