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?