£58.73 The average train ticket price paid by users of Evolvi’s booking systems in 2014. This compares to an average of £59.03 per ticket in 2013.
1.6 million The number of transactions
Thetrainline.com processed through its corporate online booking tools in 2014.
FLY-RAIL PARTNERSHIPS
A PARTNERSHIP THAT BECAME the first to combine UK rail and air travel in a single booking is set to continue after First Great Western had its franchise renewed for four years. First Great Western and
akin to a global distribution system for rail across Europe. “As corporate booking tools, such as Amadeus E-Travel Management, provide access to an increasing range of rail content, it is easier than ever for corpo- rate travellers to book rail journeys,” says Thomas Drexler, Amadeus’s director of rail and ground travel. “As a result, corporate travel policies are more likely to encourage business travellers to use the train, and to include rail as an option in their policy, even on routes traditionally dominated by other modes.” However, there are many business travel- lers who buy tickets at the station before they jump on to the train, or use a consumer channel to buy tickets. Are they effectively untrackable, or can technology help their travel manager to know where they are?
Thetrainline.com says that while all bookings made through its consumer sites are tracked, the system would not know they were a business traveller and would automatically regard them as a leisure cus- tomer. “During a consumer booking flow, we would not be capturing the necessary MI, executing travel policy or processing the booking to the corporate payment mechanism,” says Morrissey. “For those reasons, the travel manager would much rather we help push that user back into a compliant corporate booking process.” Click’s McLean says there is no
“straightforward” way of capturing book- ings made outside the preferred channels because of a lack of automated data feeds from these consumer booking platforms. “You are reliant on the people making the
106 BBT MAY/JUNE 2015
Is a business traveller who uses a consumer platform to buy tickets effectively untrackable?
booking taking some form of action to get the data into your preferred data source,” he adds. “Some websites have support for services such as Trip It or Worldmate, which can then be used to push data into an expense management system. But it’s a brittle process – if a booker forgets to do whatever they need to do, the data vanishes into the ether.”
A MOBILE FUTURE? There are currently several ways for busi- ness travellers to receive their train tickets through corporate booking tools, such as touch-screen kiosks, ticket collection on departure, and self-printed tickets. But it may be that mobile technology eventually provides the best way to manage and track rail travellers. Evolvi’s Reeve says that the company has been developing a mobile ticketing capability to be deployed in the “not- too-distant future”. But he adds: “What’s holding back the adoption of mobile and any other form of smart technology is the fragmented nature of the rail industry’s
Heathrow Express launched the ‘through-ticketing’ option in January 2014 with Singapore Airlines, and struck a similar deal with British Airways in the same year.
The partnership, which only applies to bookings made through TMCs and travel agencies, enables the flight, Great Western rail journey to Paddington, and Heathrow Express rail service all to be included in a single booking. First Great Western’s franchise had been due to expire in September 2015, but the Department for Transport has now extended it to April 2019. Angus McIntyre, head of business development at Heathrow Express, says of the partnership: “The feedback has been very positive. As it is a relatively new proposition, particularly the partnership with British Airways, take-up is building. “With the product only available to the trade, there is a smaller market to go after compared to being on the direct consumer channels, but the solution has been very reliable and is working well.” As part of First Great
Western’s new franchise agreement, it has promised to add 4,000 more seats into London every morning by December 2018, and a total of three million extra seats per year across the network by 2018.
BUYINGBUSINESSTRAVEL.COM
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