If so, you may have been unwittingly influenced by so-called ‘nudge theory’ – the idea that by giving people small nudges you can influence behaviour on the large scale. Many local authorities have erected signs saying that 95 per cent of dog owners are responsible and bag their dog poo. It has been shown to work. HMRC, after carrying out a trial on 100,000 taxpayers, now says in its reminder letters that ‘nine out of 10 people in the UK pay their tax on time’; it claims to have increased tax revenues by £210 million as a result. But can nudge theory be used in business
travel to influence behaviour and help travel buyers make savings? Severnside Consulting’s Chris Pouney thinks it can. “Nudge theory has been adopted by more than 70 governments globally which rec- ognise that spending time developing the right choice architecture is critical when attempting to influence citizens to make, what they consider as ‘the right choices’.”
It is not a new idea. Visual guilt – long talked about as the lever that can influence behaviour in online booking tools – is still alive and well, and nudges travellers to make ‘good choices’. Traffic light signals are used as a nudge
behaviour tool by a number of booking tool providers, indicating which suppliers are preferred, other suppliers and those that are non-compliant, perhaps because they breach a rate cap. This visual signal can be used to influence behaviour towards
green-lighted suppliers – the travellers’ subconscious does the rest. “We learn it from a being a child,” says
Click Travel’s director of operations Chris Vince. “When something is red, avoid it.” But Pouney thinks it’s less effective with certain people. “Would visual guilt work on a CEO or a road warrior who feels it’s their right to travel in first class?” he asks. “I’m not so sure. I see a number of companies who install technology and new influence approaches and end up finding out what they knew already – that the policy is not being used by one group of people.”
Traffic light behaviour is not a given, and Egencia senior director Jean-Noel Lau Keng Lun suggests looking at real data instead. “We can all read the studies that say that the colour green will encourage and the colour red will discourage behaviours, but we can do more: you can actually test your assumptions by testing a green button and a red button and see what happens. Sometimes you will see totally unexpected behaviours,” he says. Click Travel is using subtle techniques to influence hotel booking behaviour in its booking tool. “If I am a traveller and I have only just joined the company, and I am booking a trip to London for the first time, some of the hotels that others in the company stay in would feature higher up in the results,” says Vince.
This has the effect of concentrating hotel spend in fewer properties, giving greater leverage in negotiations and promoting hotels that travellers may like more, particularly when coupled with user- generated reviews.
The app environment, which many younger travellers feel more comfortable
working within, can also help. “Travel managers can adopt apps as primary vehicles for providing short-form, proac- tive communication, such as on-demand travel policy tips or timely travel data to travellers,” says American Express GBT vice-president Jason Geall. “Automated notifications can also be set up to inform travellers whether their booking is within policy or not. The real- time communication, delivered in formats travellers already use, will do much more to guide compliance than lengthy rules or complicated communications rolled out quarterly or annually.” Geall says the company’s research shows that 44 per cent of travel managers, pre- dominately at large corporations, have introduced apps and a further 19 per cent intend to introduce them within the next two years.
Companies such as EY are using robotics and messaging to influence behaviour (see box, page 112). To work well, messaging around issues such as advance booking windows and out-of-policy bookings is going to have to become more person- alised, argues Capita Travel and Events’ chief information officer Paul Saggar. “The types of automated emails and pop-ups we’ve seen in the market are largely generic – they will only work to a certain extent because everyone gets the same message, regardless of how, where, when and why they meet, travel or book. Personalised and dynamic content is the only way buyers will achieve real, long- term influence and change that gives them the results desired by their different stakeholders,” he says. Capita Travel and Events is bringing its parent company’s expertise in nudge be- haviour – it employs a team of behavioural
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