What does the emergence of metasearch engines bring to corporate travel management?

JESÚS ÁNGEL CERVANTES, Corporate IT Consultant de AMADEUS ESPAÑA

 

A 48% of travel bookings worldwide are made, according to PhocusWright, online. The progressive increase in Internet sales has been contributed to by the change in the traveler's profile, but also by the emergence of numerous players operating on the Internet: hotel and airline sites, online travel agencies, flash sales sites, meta-search engines… 

The latter, precisely, have acquired great popularity in recent times thanks to television advertising with which they are increasing their use among the general public. However, ?are these price comparators úuseful for the corporate traveler? 

Designed for the holiday tourist, metasearch engines present a series of limitations for the corporate traveler. Compliance with the company's travel policy, automated expense reporting, data analysis and rate negotiation are elements that are alien to the metasearch engine's dynamics, and are precisely some of the keys to savings in corporate travel.

Even the most modest companies should bear in mind that designing a travel policy, however simple it may be, can reduce their spending;by up to 25%, and that negotiating with hotels can help you achieve savings of 16% on this item. Likewise, the use of self-booking tools could lead to savings of between 5% and 8%, since the management of travel requests and the processing of expenses represents 46% of indirect expenses.

All in all, there is something that corporate travel owes to metasearch engines and, by extension, to the entire repertoire of online players that we often use for our leisure. If anything helps to achieve savings in corporate travel, it is a good level of adoption of a self-booking tool and, logically, the users who are most accustomed to using online for personal purposes are also the ones most accustomed to using it for personal purposes;The self-booking tool sometimes advances along a path already trodden by the holiday industry and, at least in that sense, in an indirect way, the metasearch engine contributes its grain of sand to corporate travel.