As the high-flying corporate travel segment suddenly finds its wings tied due to the tightening of budgets, travel agencies both online and offline are pedalling specialised corporate travel booking tools. Of late, there have been a slew of launches from the likes of Makemytrip.com, Amadeus, Cleartrip.com, which promise not only considerable savings on travel expenditure but also keep a check on avoidable travel and extravagance during trips.
?This economic slowdown has shifted corporate travel from an administrative issue to something that needs the approval of the top guys ? the COOs or the CEOs,? said a travel analyst. In such a scenario, it is not surprising that corporates are going for tools that bar bookings unless approved by the designate person or make available the lowest fares for that particular day comparing it with the actual bookings made.
?In the traditional model, the company would not know about the expenditure entailed by their employees till the bills arrived on the table at month-end. With such tools, the extravagance and avoidable travel can be blocked before the damage has been done to the company?s exchequer,? said Ankur Bhatia, managing director, Amadeus India. Amadeus recently launched softwares called Amadeus e-Travel Management and Bird Res-SBT solutions that help companies to streamline their travel costs.
Online travel agency, Cleartrip.com has launched a different portal cleartripforbusiness.com, which has put in place three levels of approvals for employees who book tickets on the portal. ?There are people, who can only view bookings, then they are those who can book tickets and finally employees in position of authority who can add or delete people from the list, view reports on travel and also make bookings,? said Tarique Khatri, vice-president, business development, Cleartrip.com.
He added that companies can save anywhere between 6-10% on using this portal, which also has an incentive scheme if companies made deposits in advance. So far, Cleartrip has had 240 companies sign up for the portal. A market leader in the online travel bookings domain, Makemytrip.com has launched a tool called Distance-Meter Tool to enhance the purchase decision-process of frequent travellers in terms of booking a hotel on the basis of distance from a location.
According to Rajnish Kapur, chief innovation officer, MakeMyTrip.com, ?Distance-Meter is now the single highest-used tool in the hotels section, with over 20% of visitors employing it to assist their hotel search and booking.? The travel and tourism sector has been one of the worst hit due to the financial crisis with the leisure segment registering the largest slowdown. ?However, essential business travel will continue to be undertaken and companies will have to innovate in order to drive savings,? added Kapur.