Last week we came back from the 2007 National Business Travel Association show in Boston, where WorldMate Live was demonstrated to a couple hundred corporations, travel agents and other players in the travel space. WorldMate Live was greeted with an "A-ha" by most - it seems like the need and the solution are so clear and evident, some people are surprised this wasn't invented sooner. We also gained some in-depth knowledge of the related pains of travel managers - the people who need to re-accommodate all those travelers who missed their connections, don't know how to get to their hotel etc. Basic elements of WorldMate Live that we considered trivial are for them big time-savers. For us, that's great validation to what we're doing.
The National Business Travel Association is by nature focused more on travel developments than technology developments. It's a show where you see more versions of business class seats and models of limousines than software systems. It also seems like this is exactly what many attendees preferred and responded to. How this serves the companies that send them there I am not sure I understand. The equivalent in the technology space is sending your people to attend a trade show and getting a report that they saw great new keyboards, mice and USB adapters.
Travel is an industry that was fundamentally impacted by technology in the last decade. Internet technology facilitated direct distribution (a critical element of the low-fare airline model), online travel booking by travelers themselves (which reduces costs on the one hands - and compliance with corporate policies on the other) and informed travelers (making better operational decisions - good for the company, not necessarily for the agent). This totally changed the business of travel distribution and specifically corporate travel management. A new trend in the industry is the "procurementalization" of travel management, founded on the simple precept - "why should purchasing flight tickets be fundamentally different from purchasing office supplies, shipping services or catering services?". These trends are essentially driven by technology introduced by companies like Rearden Commerce and GetThere. WorldMate Live, through reducing the dependence on manual assistance (over the phone) to travelers is another example of cost-reduction and efficiency-improvement enabled by technology.
My point is that the modern day travel manager should seriously "get" technology, and be interested in it. Otherwise, as a corporation you will probably get the most comfy seats, but miss the fact that you can shave a significant percentage of your T&E costs - either by reducing direct costs, or by getting more out of each trip so that less trips are needed and more time can be spent actually working. Some of the travel managers we met at NBTA were exactly like that - clever, on-the-spot, business-oriented. These are the people who will make a difference for their companies.
And as for the people who attended in order to compare the business-class dinners at the top airlines? Well, I hope they work for the energy sector. Or government, for that matter. Someone else's government that is.
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