When it comes to determining business trip success, what travel managers say is important is different from what they ultimately measure. Those were the findings of a new research project from The Association of Corporate Travel Executives (ACTE) and BCD Travel. The paper, Quality Management in Business Travel, was released Oct. 12 ahead of ACTE’s 2018 Paris Global Summit & Corporate Lodging Forum.
Many of the measurements used today to determine a corporate travel program’s success were developed before the business travel industry moved from an agent model to a digital model. The idea of quality centered around savings and transaction volume.
“For example, the industry places too much emphasis on call center metrics,” said BCD’s Yannis Karmis, senior vice president of product planning and development. “With fewer and fewer transactions going through the call center, we need to pivot our thinking and measure traveler engagements through technology. For BCD, for example, this expands to the actions a traveler takes after receiving a trip alert on their phone via TripSource®.”
The report provides insights on:
- 5 ways to measure travel program quality today
- 3 overlooked factors in quality management – traveler friction, trip success rate, human resources involvement
- Traditional vs. modern approaches to quality
- What the financial services industry can teach us about quality management
- Quality management and the Amazon effect
“Our understanding of quality—service quality in particular—including traveler satisfaction, should be expanded to recognize that our engagements are now more holistic than ever [before],” Karmis said in the paper. “If a modern, high-quality corporate travel plan is what you’re looking for, then you need to be measuring more than just interactions. As a sector, we’re measuring the wrong things, with metrics that are dated for modern and future travel programs.
Download the full report here: Quality Management in Business Travel and follow Yannis Karmis on LinkedIn.
