ACCORDING TO AMON AMON COHEN
So farewell then, Hogg Robinson
HRG’s takeover by Amex GBT may be cause for gloom, but TMCs in the UK are actually in fine fettle
improvements to the pension covenant, and support from its two largest shareholders, Hogg Robinson’s directors had little choice but to recommend offers for its HRG travel management business from American Express Global Business Travel (Amex GBT) and Spendvision payments business from Visa. It’s a sad moment, nonetheless. An estimated 6-8 per cent of employees across both HRG and Amex GBT will lose their jobs to support the acquisition’s partial rationale of cost reduction. In a small, well-networked industry like ours, that means we will pretty much all see able friends go. British readers will also mourn the extinction of a UK company with a 170-year pedigree which competed proudly and successfully at a global level. After so long at the centre of UK corporate travel life, it’s difficult to contemplate the Hogg Robinson/HRG name not being around any more. Amex GBT reserves the rights to the brand, but previous experience of its acquisitions of other big companies including Thomas Cook Travel Management (1994) and Rosenbluth International (2003) suggest it is unlikely to be used again in a major way. HRG will be greatly missed. Yet the felling of a mighty oak in the TMC forest also creates light for others to grow, and I am
W
BUYINGBUSINESSTRAVEL.COM
ITH A SHARE PRICE premium of 50 per cent, substantial
optimistic about the health of UK TMCs right now. I believe several will seize the opportunities that have been created.
The UK has long benefited from
Amon Cohen is a specialist business travel writer,
conference moderator and media trainer.
a remarkably robust marketplace of mid-sized TMCs, which have thrived where similar companies in other countries, such as the US, have not. What is more, I think they are getting stronger. Certainly that was my abiding impression of this year’s Business Travel Show, which made it, for my money, the most vibrant yet in its two decades-plus history (declaration of interest: I am the show’s conference co-producer). Let me give you a couple of examples of UK success. The first two TMCs to sign up to Lufthansa Group’s New Distribution Capability programme in 2017 weren’t German, they were British. At this year’s show I saw several others introducing flexible distribution alternatives as airlines move to new sales channels. I also found TMCs combining and customising tech tools from the US in a way that US-based TMCs have yet to do themselves. And I saw many examples of TMCs exploring better ways to serve customers, such as creating business intelligence that monitors traveller well-being or attempts to understand which journeys are worth taking and which are not.
In short, this looks like something of a golden era for TMCs, and, therefore, for travel managers, who have plenty to choose from. TMCs are genuinely
A DIGITAL ASSISTANT TOO FAR One innovation I am less than enthusiastic about is having voice-controlled digital assistants in hotel guest rooms.
Call me a Luddite if you will, but a leading travel technologist recently laid out to me exactly why he wouldn’t dream of having such a device in his home, such is the risk of hacking the information they store, shutting down essential household appliances, appropriating them for bugging, and so on. If that’s a risk with your own device, can you trust one belonging to someone else? The potential for misuse – especially for 1984-ish surveillance either by conspiracy or cock-up – would not allow me to sleep comfortably. And for what? I see little potential gain having a digital assistant in a small hotel room. Surely it’s not so hard to change the air-con or open the curtains that makes this invasion of one’s personal space worthwhile. That said, there are some useful a things a digital assistant could do. If I could command it to find the setting on most hotel showers between scalding hot and sub-Arctic cold, or score the paracetamol I so badly need after excessive “networking” the night before, or silence that salesman taking noisy leave of a colleague outside my door at 3am, then I might be interested.
BBT May/June 2018 47
differentiating themselves more, so getting to understand what each can offer is research that would increasingly pay off for any buyer.
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