Travel agencies have always been a key pillar of the business travel industry, as have GDSs. Despite declarations of their decline, they have been able to evolve and adapt. Our Group is working with these players to shape the future of business travel, providing them with new technologies to meet the needs of corporate customers and business travellers alike. As experts, our group is constantly on the lookout to meet the growing needs of these companies, keeping a close eye on market trends. Without ever placing Corporate and TMC in opposition, we leave our customers the choice to define their strategy according to their needs and budget. The absorption of a major business travel player like CWT by Amex GBT has a significant medium-term impact on the market, by restricting the choice of key accounts. However, in the long term, it could pave the way for new entrants. This acquisition underlines the volatility of the business travel market, marked by major technological upheavals, requiring a sharp strategic vision and substantial investment.

And this is precisely where our Group, entity by entity, country by country, is investing to deliver tailored solutions to travel agencies, helping them to optimize their productivity and offer efficient, agile booking, payment, billing and reporting technology solutions to their customers.

Finally, if I were to make a more profound conclusion, our partnership with travel agencies is part of a resolutely optimistic trajectory. We are united in our common quest for strength, growth and unity. Together, we are paving the way for a future of success and expansion, exploring the global aspects of business travel. In this partnership, we harness not only the power of our synergies but also the effectiveness of our collaboration, driving our companies to higher levels of success, where excellence and innovation thrive.

The major changes experienced by Travel Management Companies (TMCs) in 2021, coming out of the pandemic, are clearly not over. At the end of March 2024, the announcement of Amex GBT’s takeover of its competitor CWT sent shockwaves through the business travel community. A few days later, we learned of the purchase of Direct Travel by the ex-founder of Concur, alongside several investment funds. While the acquisitions of 2021 seemed to reflect a search for complementarities (technological or market), GBT’s latest external growth operation illustrates a race for size through the addition of volumes. In the short term, global corporate clients facing a quasi-duopoly are unlikely to benefit. In the medium term, however, we could see the rise of a new international player. What do these movements tell us about the challenges facing TMCs today?

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Business travel agencies: time to make choices

« As a CEO in a sector that combines hospitality and technology, innovation and forward-thinking strategies have always been at the heart of my approach. We’ve already integrated a lot of automation into our business travel missions, we now need to go further by incorporating machine learning and advanced AI into our operations. To do this, we need to equip our teams with knowledge and practices on these new solutions.

At a time when personalized experiences and operational efficiency are paramount, it’s essential to leverage AI to improve every facet of travel. We can revolutionize customer experiences, streamline operations and set new benchmarks in the business travel sector.

The future of travel isn’t just about destinations; it’s about the innovative experience we create for every traveler. Let’s drive innovation and act for a more connected, efficient and personalized travel industry, » declaires Ziad Minkara.

« GENAI » has been named by The Economist as the word of the year 2023. AI in general, and Generative AI in particular, are likely to have a strong impact on the business travel industry. These technologies can influence various aspects of it, from pre-trip to post-trip: booking, expense management, customer experience, safety and compliance, as well as data analysis. In 2024, however, the time is not yet ripe for a revolution in business travel usage. These technologies are often more complex to integrate than they appear, and the aim is for them to produce a truly perceptible benefit for the traveller. In the short term, it’s the new conversational customer relations agents that could make the difference.

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What impact will AI have on the Travel business?

When you belong to the world of tourism, it would be unforgivable not to be delighted that France, and in particular its capital, will be the showcase for the whole world in 2024.

As part of the tourism community, it’s exciting to look forward to France, especially Paris, being in the spotlight for the whole world in 2024.

Or: As members of the tourism industry…
 

The intense preparations for this moment of joy, sporting excitement and festivities must not, however, lead us to sacrifice the long term for the immediate.

The French hotel industry, in all its richness and diversity, is certainly benefiting from exceptional momentum, but it must not lose sight of the fact that success is built over time. It must demonstrate its ability to remain loyal to its business travellers and corporate customers, whose contribution is fundamental and will last well beyond this fleeting moment. If we can adopt an approach based on customer loyalty throughout this period 2024, we will be able to capitalise on the opportunities offered by the Olympic Games, while ensuring the continued prosperity of the hospitality industry. Together, let’s build strong partnerships with our business travellers to make 2024 and the years to come a memorable and successful time for all » says Ziad Minkara, CEO CDS Groupe.

For the 3rd year running, CDS Groupe’s business hotel barometer provides an overview of the situation in France and Europe. The inflationary trend has continued in France in 2023 under the combined effect of several factors: the massive return of international tourists creating pressure on the occupancy rate, the Rugby World Cup, and the impact of rising service costs (energy, food, staff). The dynamism of the leisure clientele is affecting room availability, with inevitable repercussions on corporate prices. The pressure is unlikely to ease in 2024 with the impact of the Paris Olympics. While hoteliers are delighted about this, business travellers could suffer.

This summary is based on the round table discussion « Business hotel barometer: What trends for 2024? at the Grand Live du Voyage d’affaires, held on 18 January 2024, organised by CDS Groupe in partnership with IFTM Top Resa and moderated by François-Xavier Izenic with Vanessa Heydorff, Managing Director France of Booking.com, Vanguelis Panayotis, CEO of MKG Consulting, Philippe Mettey, VP Sales & Marketing of The Ascott Group, and Ziad Minkara, CEO of CDS Groupe.

Download the Business Travel Report dedicated to trends in the business hotel sector.

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Smart spend: digitalisation and streamlining in travel expense management

In a post-Covid business travel recovery environment, online booking tools are facing a host of new demands from corporate clients, TMCs and end users alike. OBTs, which have become indispensable in the business travel industry, are required to improve their technological performance, the completeness of the content they offer and their ability to organize it according to new CSR criteria and more fluid interfaces. Faced with this set of challenges, client companies sometimes seem to have doubts about their ability to meet them.

Never before have airline tickets, hotel rooms and car rentals been accessible from so many sources. The purpose of OBT is to gather, organize and make readable this wealth of content in light of each company’s travel policy. However, these contents will become more complex as a result of two factors: the NDC standard for air transport on the one hand, and the liberalization of the rail market on the other.

The content challenge: NDC and Rail

While facing the NDC standard, OBTs have often been accused of a certain lack of eagerness to integrate it. Today, pushed by the airlines, they declare themselves ready for the switchover on a functional and technological level. However, they all underlign that this is not only up to them. The successful transition to NDC requires an alignment of the entire business travel supply chain, of which OBTs are only one of the links.

Another challenge for OBT in 2023 is the rail content, due to the accelerated opening of the European rail market to competition. In France, Trenitalia has been offering five daily Paris-Lyon shuttles since 2022, two of which extend across the border to Milan. Renfe, for its part, is interested in the Lyon-Marseille connection. Spain is already a laboratory for opening up to competition: SNCF’s Ouigo operates on the Madrid-Barcelona route, then Madrid-Valencia-Alicante, joined by the Spanish-Italian group Iryo, which also serves the route between Castile and Catalonia.

The challenge is to integrate this new content, country by country and region by region, so that companies can offer their passengers « train » alternatives wherever possible, with the objective to reduce their CO2 emissions.

CSR, when will we have harmonized indicators?

In terms of CSR, the concern of companies is not limited to the question of the « rail » offer. Their objective is to be able to display information on the carbon footprint of their trips in the OBT in order to gradually « educate » their passengers on the impacts of their choices. Traditionally, the focus has been on displaying the comparative emissions of train and air travel in a binary decision-making perspective, but today we feel that the requirement goes further: it is a matter of arbitrating between « rail, air and actually I don’t travel and I take another decision » explains Guillaume Ridolfi, Sales Director France and Benelux of SAP Concur.

However, the big problem companies face is that the « carbon » indicators are not harmonized from one OBT to another, because they are not based on the same calculation methodologies.

OBTs do not design the CO2 calculators, they integrate methodologies designed by others based on parameters that can vary considerably. For example, when it comes to air travel emissions, does the calculator consider such critical parameters as the type of aircraft, the size of the aircraft, the type of engine and therefore of fuel, the class chosen by the traveler, the direct or stopover nature of the flight, etc.? It is therefore necessary to establish an international standard that is accepted and recognized by the entire sector.

UX, towards a B2C level experience?

Another topic is the design or the user interface.

The proposed UX are far from having reached the levels of fluidity and ergonomics of consumer booking tools, and many travelers complain about it.

OBTs assure they have heard this recurring complaint and all confirm working hard on it. But depending on how long they’ve been around, they have different levels of technical debt to make up. Goelett, for example, which arrived on the market in 2016, benefits in this respect from being the « new kid on the block. » As Pierre Mesnage, Goelett’s CEO, explains, « We were able to benefit from both good and bad examples. We stripped down the screen and tried to keep what is really useful, what allows you to book quickly, reducing the number of clicks, with a screen that is readable at first glance and with a limited number of colors but well thought out, etc. »

In addition to this set of structural challenges, there is a cyclical event: the disappearance of a market player, Traveldoo, which has not found a buyer. On the contrary to what one might imagine, the disappearance of a competitor is never good news for a market. Even if the failure creates additional space for each individual player in the short term, it also sends the signal that the overall pie is shrinking. In any case, the remaining OBTs must mobilize in 2023 to ensure a large number of customer migrations, in a hurry and with unusual delays, to say the least.

It will be a busy year for OBTs. The sweep of the addressed demands showsparticularly the extent to which these tools have become indispensable to the smooth running of business travel.

Download a preview of the 9th Business Travel Report dedicated to technology: « Are OBTs ready to meet the new challenges of business travel?

To the massive intelligence of all our technological tools, we want to add the collective intelligence of our entire business travel community. Our industry needs it because it has to face what we call the CDD: Conjuncture, Digitalisation, Decarbonation.
The economic situation is still marked by uncertainty: wars, geopolitical rivalries, domestic disorders and their deleterious consequences; digitalisation is the magic cauldron from which our organizations must draw in order to be more efficient; decarbonisation is our collective and sectoral challenge, because there will be no company that wins in a world that loses.

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Business hotels: in the price jungle

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Distribution of business travel: when the cards are reshuffled

« Despite a context that remains difficult, the voluntary commitments of our sector in environmental and social matters must be reinforced. Not only are CO2 emissions rising impressively – even if passenger transport is far from being the first cause -, but the demands of our customers are increasing in these areas as well because of the anticipation of more restrictive normative production. For these reasons, since 2008, CDS Groupe promoted diversity and inclusion, wished to testify of its voluntarism by signing the « Supplier Relations and Responsible Purchasing » charter supported by the Business Mediator, and by continuing to obtain the corresponding label. We are convinced that the lever of responsible purchasing is important for mobilizing our employees and involving the entirety of our ecosystem towards more virtuous behaviors. In the same logic, we participate within APECA in the constitution of CAMP (APECA Club for Public Mobility), in order to actively stay in touch with public purchasers, their new expectations and create common reference systems supporting their objectives. Our sector must no longer be considered a problem, but as a bearer of sustainable and united solutions instead. This is the meaning of our action » says Ziad Minkara

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Responsible purchasing: systemic levers for CSR

Viva Techology, the largest European Tech and start-up fair, took place in Paris a few days ago hybridly, mixing virtual and face-to-face, alongside numerous digital services. This reinvention of trade shows, and more particularly technology dedicated ones, sets the tone for the ups and downs that business travel will experience. In the upcoming years, our sector will be completely eaten up by digital technologies, we believe that to an extent after seeing what tourist travel experienced in the 2000s. The current changes in means of payment, to which we are devoting this 4th episode of our series, are certainly the most obvious manifestation of this. CDS Groupe intends to be at the forefront of these changes and encourage all its partners to embrace this promising future with determination.

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Summer is approaching with tangible signs of hope after months of uncertainty. The accelerated vaccination, the French followed by the European health pass, a clear timetable of activities resuming is finally there, the prospect of having lunch soon on the terrace… everything contributes to a certain renewed optimism. The French are now travel thirsty and preparing their holidays. And this is encouraging as the return to an environement of trust will determine the resumption of our activities.

Let’s not renounce our pleasure without giving in to blissful optimism. Gauges and masks will indefinitly be part of our daily practices. For proffesions like ours, the air pocket that experienced for 18 months was unprecedented and terrible. Beyond the activity fall, the crisis has often revealed structural difficulties, concealed by the dynamics of travel. Today, we have the exceptional chance renew our value propositions and meet societal demands, in a word… to anticipate and not just wait for the activity to slowly return to its previous level.

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