29.8% of companies use self-booking tools for travel
Almost a third of Spanish companies (29.8%) use self-booking tools to manage their business travel. This solution has helped to instill a culture of savings based on the regulation itself. The data is part of a comprehensive technology survey conducted by Forum Business Travel and Amadeus in which 120 travel managers participated.
For the first time in our country, Forum Business Travel and Amadeus have conducted a survey to determine the degree of penetration of technology in business travel and the result is encouraging, although there is still a long way to go.
Almost a third of the companies that participated in the report, which together have an estimated travel spend of 374 million euros a year, use self-booking tools. According to their estimate, the average savings they get on airfares is around 14.5%.
The “Observatory of Technologyía and Innovationón applied to Business Travel” radiographía the panorama of Business Travel in our country in seven sections: authorization processes, self-booking tools, travel expenses, report management, payment method, traveler connectivity and environmental policy.
Although travel expense analysis is carried out in 82.7% of cases, more than half (55.2%) of the managers surveyed use manual procedures. Another area for improvement identified by the Observatory concerns the internal authorization of travel. A regulated procedure is in place in 85.2% of the companies, but only half of them are automated. As far as reporting is concerned, a large majority (66.3%) have a statistics system for analyzing the expenses generated by their travel. 80% of the data is provided by the travel agency.
One of the most striking results relates to the connectivity of corporate travelers. Across all variables analyzed, the predominant response is that they “never” or “rarely” use mobile self-booking tools, download apps, use geo-referenced destination information, receive safety tips and alerts or review travel documentation. Corporate social networks to share travel information are only commonly used by 2.4% of travelers.
For Oacute;scar García, founding partner of Forum Business Travel, “this is one of the points where companies must clearly improve. Technology has changed the concept of business travel. Until now it was focused on management and is becoming more and more traveler-oriented, but we are still in the infancy of connectivity.
Íñigo García-Aranda, marketing director of Amadeus España, said that “companies should embrace technology, but understand it as a means to travel better and more efficiently, not as an end in itself.
According to its data, the penetration rate of self-booking tools in France is double that of Spain.
At the presentation event, held at the Sheraton Madrid Mirasierra hotel, in front of almost a hundred travel managers from large and medium-sized companies, the following also took part: Raquel Gutiérrez, from Electrolux; Laura González, from Samsung Electronic Iberia; Alejandro Palmarola, from the Leche Pascual Group; and Richard Wolf, from General Electric. All agreed that technology is helping to generate a corporate culture of savings based on employee responsibility.