O COVID nos ensinará como simplificar as viagens de negócios?

Kurt Knackstedt:

We’re going to start off, again, talking about the pandemic is certainly the main point of conversation anywhere in the travel industry today. But if you look beyond the media and all the stories about what’s happening with how the pandemic has impacted travel, there’s an argument to be made that perhaps when an industry completely shuts down. Is there a chance to come out of it in a way that’s actually better, easier, smoother other things that we used to do that we don’t have to do going forward? And is this an opportunity for the industry to change the way they’re doing things?

And so what we’re looking at is, has the pandemic actually potentially helped the industry rethink and reframe how it does things? So with that, Florence, I might start with you. Do you think that there has been anything that you’ve learned through the pandemic that actually might help us simplify the travel program going forward, even with the challenges of the pandemic has brought, has it given us a chance to rethink what could be easier and simpler in the future?

Florence Robert:

Yeah, definitely. We already have kind of a layer of approval process or preapproval process before a trip. That’s not linked to any monetary items or anything. It’s more a destination and so on. But with the pandemic, because we’ve restricted travel to business [predictable 00:03:28], we had to think of our approval process and how we could actually streamline it and make it more efficient in the future than what we currently have. With possibility of forwarding approval into higher level, which was not really existing in our program until then. We also had the opportunity, unfortunately, in a way in some country where travel really dropped a lot or even came to zero to basically do a full refunding of our travel program basically. We took the opportunity of like reviewing the whole travel policy and trying to see ways where we could be more efficient, more straightforward.

We did a lot of education with our travelers during that downtime. Yeah, Ericsson is a telecom company. We have a lot of engineers going abroad and so on. Because they were not able to travel, we actually use that time to remind them a lot of policy compliance to the principle of the policies and so on. So we’re definitely use that downtime as much as possible. And we’ve also taken the downtime to start to see on how we travel pattern and how we could improve that in the future once travel resume. We’ve not had a lot of that opportunity in [MNEA 00:04:58] because they’re far away of everyone else and Northeast Asia has rebounded way, way quicker.

So that downtime has been way smaller in China or in Japan that it’s been in other regions. So, it’s a place where we’re moving kind of along with pandemic at the moment, but for all the otherregions, yes, we’ve definitely now worked on streamlining things and trying to find more efficient way and also to avoid some of the travel because we found out that whereas we’re very profitable without traveling. And as a result, there’s a big question mark that has been raised by senior management on do you need to travel that much? And we’re going to have a big [refund 00:05:53] on that definitely in the future.

Kurt Knackstedt:

Okay. That’s a great point there, Florence, because the saying I’ve been using during this is, “You rarely get a chance to change the tires on a car when it’s moving.” And right now the car is definitely not moving. So it is an opportunity to rethink things and retool things.

Florence Robert:

Sim.

Kurt Knackstedt:

Sounds like you’ve done some of that in Ericsson which is great, but also glad to hear that some people are traveling again in this region, which is good to hear. It’s a good start.

Florence Robert:

They are definitely traveling again. We’re back to like 95% complete.

Kurt Knackstedt:

Wow, okay. All right.

Paul Dear:

Uau.

Kurt Knackstedt:

That’s good to hear, that’s what we want to hear. So thanks for that, Florence. Dionne, I guess, from your perspective as a TMC, how do you see the simplification of travel going, again, coming we still have some ways to go before things get back to whatever normal will look like at the end of the pandemic. But how do you see the role of the TMC facilitating simplification making the travel program easier to manage going forward?

Dionne Yuen:

Yeah, definitely. I think, before COVID, everyone was talking about maybe when they drop their travel policy, they will try to define what will be the essential travel. But I think once COVID has started, people have started to think about, what will it be like permissible. When we say permissible travel, which means not just only it will be compliant with the company, but it also has to make the employee who needs to travel feel comfortable, and also whether the government will allow such travel. So that’s why I think when we are because… For sure the COVID will have a very big impact on the business travel industry, especially for a TMC, but then, actually, it gives us a perfect opportunity for the travel managers to think about the connection between the business travel and the employee risk.

So that’s why when we try to think about how our tools can actually help all the travel managers to optimize their travel and to mitigate other travel risks. We strongly believe that having trusted sources of information are for border status, security, travel restrictions therefore lay our audit for the global destination will be a very late important tool for all our travelers. So that’s why we, actually, during the COVID year although travel has dropped a lot, but then our product team actually had been working really hard and they are super busy in order how to optimize our OBT. For example, we have developed one that’s called Egencia Travel Advisor, which I also tried it myself. And it’s actually very user-friendly, it allows like a search result. Whenever you need to travel to certain destination, you just type it in and then it will immediately pop up the list of detailed restriction and requirement. So that the employees and the travel managers, they will be able to decide whether they should send a staff for this travel.

Actually, I would agree that technology has helped the travel managers to optimize the travel policy. But, of course, I think Florence also bring up a good point that like the previous brief conversation we also had is that not just only we need to consider the travel risk and then how the travel manager less simplify the travel management. But at the same time, I think the company is being exposed to a new risk, which is how do you work with the HR, the IT team and the legal team, and also the employees in order to rethink of business travel and how to manage manual travel. So that’s why we believe that having like a trusted source of showing the global travel requirements is very important, especially the situation of COVID right now is evolving every day.

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Avatar de Linda Hohnholz, editora da eTN

Linda Hohnholz, editora da eTN

Linda Hohnholz escreve e edita artigos desde o início de sua carreira profissional. Ela aplicou essa paixão inata a lugares como a Hawaii Pacific University, a Chaminade University, o Hawaii Children's Discovery Center e agora o TravelNewsGroup.

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