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As the market for mobile apps matures, Linda Fox tracks what’s new and fi nds out how far technology companies are from launching a fully integrated solution that will keep travellers in policy
thought as to whether it would ever be used. Now, much of the app hype has died down and real use cases for mobiles and tablets are being explored by both technology specialists and travel management companies. So far, mobile apps are being used for
A
travel itineraries, alerts, travel information, and profile information such as seat preferences, weather updates and maps. But the next stage – booking travel via mobile devices, and within policy – is now being talked about and the big issue is how travel teams manage the process. The challenge is to provide travellers
year ago mobile technology was all about developing an application and getting it to market with seemingly little
with a bit more flexibility and improve their experience while still maintaining control over spend, still gathering management information and ensuring corporate duty of care obligations are met via traveller tracking. Travel managers see the potential for mobile to bring about policy leakage and maverick spend but an increasingly young workforce is pushing to make the most of the technology they have grown up with. Step forward Carla, a virtual agent
initiative being developed by Carlson Wagonlit Travel for mobile. Carla is part of the company’s strategy to offer business travellers relevant social, location-based and mobile services at their finger tips but with all the required company policies and controls still in place.
In conjunction with specialists in speech
recognition technology and artificial intelligence, the TMC is seeking to bring together the ability to make a travel transaction on mobile but in a different way to what is already accessible via online booking tools. A second goal is to integrate all of the local travel knowledge and advice from its staff across the globe and enable travellers to tap into it. A prototype application was trialled
internally in the second half of 2012 with 100 city pairs where a traveller spoke their proposed trip into their device. It was checked with travel policy, sent off to a GDS for live inventory and would present four options – shortest, cheapest, preferred and a recommendation. Learnings from the trial are informing
current developments and feedback from travel managers includes a suggestion to remind travellers of travel policy along the way. Next steps include testing the
78 THE BUSINESS TRAVEL MAGAZINE
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