www.buyingbusinesstravel.com
BT Show
Conference moderator Amon Cohen
so it could focus on its most important hotels in top destinations. “We are negotiating rates in static locations that are the key places we travel to,” he said. “Reduce RFPs, and zero in on your key cities and properties to drive deeper discounts. We have been trying to change the conversation with suppliers to get away from market share commitments to look at revenue growth instead, which we then use to drive discounts.” He said his company also tried to make sure that hotels guaranteed last-room availability, and rates also included services such as wifi. “We have made several acquisitions and are still growing – we try to leverage spend to get the best discounts,” he added. “We also negotiate high volume rates separately from the rest of our programme to maximise savings and eliminate overlap.”
TECHNOLOGY ‘MOBILE PAYMENTS TO BENEFIT BUYERS’ Payments using mobile devices are set to take around five years to become widely used in the corporate travel world, according to experts at the show’s hosted buyer conference. Mario Zorn, product manager for mobile payments at Airplus, said that travel managers would eventually benefit from the move to mobile payments as they would produce better quality data about their travellers’ activities. “There are lots of advantages to mobile payments, as the higher quality data they produce will give new ways to analyse things,
such as travel compliance, and also provide a new basis for price negotiations,” he said. “They could also feed into travel expenses and become used for the reimbursement of these expenses. But it will not happen overnight – four to five years is a realistic time frame.” Zorn said Airplus had created a prototype app which used a Blackberry and also included near field communication (NFC) for contactless payment. He added that once this technology was rolled out
People are more mobile, but there are still issues such as bandwith and roaming charges
to business travellers, smartphones and tablets could be used for paying airline ancillaries and hotel extras at the end of their stay. Simon Barker, CEO at payment specialist Conferma, said: “This will be a profound change. It’s going to make a big difference and will have a significant effect over the next four to five years.” Barker also said single-use virtual credit cards would become more prevalent in the next few years because they were more secure and efficient in feeding data back to travel managers than existing solutions, such as lodge cards. Zorn said that virtual cards would eventually “go together with mobile payments because they give you much more data and security, and the possibility to manage and control spending behaviour”.
HRG LAUNCHES SINGLE PLATFORM FOR MOBILE DEVICES HRG announced it has redeveloped its online I-Suite to create a web- based platform designed to give a consistent display and experience for all devices, including smartphones, tablets, laptops and desktop computers. HRG’s tech development director
Paul Saggar said the creation of a single platform was driven by the huge number of new phones and tablets entering the market. “We are trying to provide a consistent experience regardless of device. We have been rethinking our approach – people are more mobile but there are still issues such as bandwidth and roaming charges,” said Saggar. The new platform, which has been developed in-house by HRG, features a range of different elements, including booking details, flight status updates, expense management, weather forecasts and other information – all of which can be personalised and moved around the screen, although some elements can also be locked into position by travel managers.
The mobile version of the portal, which uses internet language HTML5, will connect through wifi and mobile networks. Saggar said that HRG would be sending out a “minimum of information” to avoid potentially high roaming and data costs when travelling overseas. The new platform is being trialled, with plans to launch it fully in Q2 this year.
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