Unmanaged business travelers could turn out to be the big one that got away.
It’s a story that begs to be told in angling metaphors. If he were alive today, Ernest Hemingway himself might be inspired by the elusiveness of these creatures called corporate travelers. The fickleness of them.
Indeed, if Papa were still with us, The Old Man and the Sea might have turned out very differently.
No disrespect intended. But unmanaged business travelers really are our industry’s big fish: $56 billion is spent on corporate travel annually, and by some estimates, more than half of it isn’t handled by company travel managers but by rank-and-file employees just looking for good deals, or to maximize their frequent flyer miles, or for the most convenient itinerary.
Most of these purchases are made through an agent or airline. A fraction, maybe two percent at best, occur online.
For years now, we’ve seen the proverbial fin cutting through the water, suggesting the prize that swims below. If only the interactive travel business could capture a bigger portion of the unmanaged business travel market, then . . .
Who knows how many online booking sites would have gone public by now, propelled to earnings greatness by capturing the trophy? Like Santiago, the Hemingway character who even in victory is deprived of his reward, our finest entrepreneurs are learning that their victories are bittersweet. Big-time success has evaded them-so far.
Why?
“Because they don’t get it,” says Rolfe Shellenberger, Runzheimer International’s resident business travel guru. “They don’t understand what the business traveler wants.”
What does the traveler want? Shellenberger believes that most booking sites need a one-screen response to booking queries, rather than a lengthy, and largely irrelevant, stream of data in which the customer must go fishing. He thinks it takes too much time to log on and make a selection. It’s that simple.
“We need to move to something more intelligent, that takes all of a traveler’s preferences and priorities into account and then delivers an itinerary based on that. Something that doesn’t overwhelm a user with information,” he adds.
David Alschuler, an analyst at Aberdeen Group in Boston, agrees. “We need better performance from the applications. At the moment, they do relatively poorly,” he says. “They seem to have forgotten the old IBM rule-that two seconds is too long. All the good graphics and the pretty customization, it gets in the way. It makes the systems slow down.”
Alschuler predicts the returns will get better as the systems get more efficient. “I think the key to success will be in improved performance,” he notes. “The users have to get in and out in roughly the same amount of time it takes them to call their travel agent today.”
It doesn’t take an insider to know that the biggest sites still struggle to compete with a carbon-based travel agent. In the hands of an inexperienced user, a phone is still easier to access than a Web page.
Still, all is not lost.
The idea of an “intelligent” agent that weighs all of a traveler’s preferences, including cost, frequent flyer miles, and convenience, is coming together, albeit in a piecemeal fashion. But we’ve got miles to go as an industry before we reach the integration, the user friendliness, and the speed the elusive business traveler needs for a Web site to be more appealing than a phone call.
A good start would be to stop denying we have a problem with the unmanaged business travel market. While researching this story, I called several big players and asked them to talk about the subject.
None returned my calls.
This suggests to me that the industry might be more than a little uncomfortable with its shortcomings. It is largely oblivious to the fact that corporate travelers can’t handle all the bandwidth-hogging Java or the countless login screens it forces users to brave while trying to book a simple flight.
Maybe, just maybe, we should be skeptical of the fish stories we tell ourselves.
Christopher Elliott is the author of Scammed: How to Save Your Money and Find Better Service in a World of Schemes, Swindles, and Shady Deals. Critics have called it “eye-opening” and “inspiring” — it’ll “grab your attention and won’t let go.” Order your copy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble or iTunes.
Elliott is consumer advocate 
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