Julian Persaud, regional director, Asia-Pacific, Airbnb
What are key corporate travel trends are you seeing this year?
Asia-Pacific currently accounts for the largest spend in business travel around the world and we expect the growth to continue.
A large driver for this growth is the shift in mindset towards the notion of “business trips”. With enjoyable experiences through personal travels, more than half of Asian business travellers now value the same experience during their business trips as well.
Around 48 per cent of Asian business travellers are interested to extend their business trips for leisure, and around 60 per cent of business trips at Airbnb in the last year included a Saturday or Sunday night because business travellers are looking for opportunities to explore a city. Almost 15 per cent of stays in our business travel programme are for over 10 days and the average stay is more than one full business week.
What corporate travel innovations have been introduced to-date?
The Airbnb for Business product, translated into 26 languages, provides a suite of tools for travel managers to help employees book and stay with Airbnb. Through corporate reporting and duty of care functions, travel managers can access and monitor data, giving them better insight into employee experience.
Airbnb’s third party booking function is the latest product in our business travel suite of tools that allows both the employer who is managing travel and the employee who is taking the trip to view trip details, make changes to the reservation and message the Airbnb host with questions about the listing or neighbourhood.
What breakthroughs in corporate travel have you achieved?
Companies from over 150 countries have signed up for our Airbnb for Business and more than 50,000 companies globally – ranging from SMEs to large corporations such as Google and Morgan Stanley – have completed bookings with Airbnb. These business travellers have travelled to more than 172 countries on Airbnb.
Reuben Lai, head of business development, Grab
What are key corporate travel trends are you seeing this year?
Mobile is a first touchpoint for travellers. Grab for Work links the Grab app to the Grab for Work web portal, enabling corporate travellers to manage transport expenses and reimbursements on their mobile devices. With the growth of on-demand services, Grab provides corporate partners with the Venue App to let guests and concierge teams book rides from their premises, now mostly in hotels, serviced residences, malls and healthcare institutions in Singapore.
What corporate travel innovations have been introduced to-date?
We have collaborated with global ridehailing partners to enable South-east Asian travellers to use their native Grab app to book Lyft, Ola and Didi rides when they visit the US, India and China respectively.
We introduced Grab for Work in May, a free corporate transport expense management solution across six South-east Asian countries. (Employers) can set and enforce ride policies, track and manage expenses, set a preferred payment option and save time by reducing paperwork. Employees can tag all Grab rides as business or personal via the app, access ride histories and manage e-receipts for reimbursements.
Grab is fully integrated with the Concur solution, so companies using that will enjoy faster expense reimbursement.
Grab’s integration with Alipay lets Chinese corporate travellers in South-east Asia pay for rides in renminbi.
What breakthroughs in corporate travel have you achieved?
Grab for Work has been used by over 150 companies since its launch. We have partnerships with airports such as in Manila where GrabCar is allowed to pick up passengers from all Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA) terminals in designated areas where booking agents will assist passengers without a smartphone or mobile data connectivity.
Chan Park, general manager, South-east Asia, Uber
What are the key corporate travel trends you are seeing this year?
We are seeing an extremely strong focus on employee safety in every aspect of business travel. Corporates continue to invest in strengthening risk management procedures and extend their duty of care to their employees.
As corporates continue to seek ways to cut business travel costs, we are seeing a shift in focus to improving employee efficiency more than just achieving cost savings.
We also are seeing a lot of new innovations in corporate travel technology including travel service apps, mobile payments and wearable technology. Corporates are slowly but surely adopting and embracing these new technologies, especially ones that improve policy management and data reporting.
What corporate travel innovations have been introduced to-date?
Uber’s mission is to provide access to convenient, reliable transportation for everyone, everywhere. We recently introduced two key products for the Singapore market – Uber for Business (U4B) and UberCENTRAL.
U4B is our corporate ride management platform to centralise and optimise transportation costs across borders. Employees are able to request rides anywhere around the world and have it automatically billed to the company. Corporates are able to easily customise ride policies and manage everything from a single dashboard.
UberCENTRAL enables any business – large or small – to request, manage and pay for Uber rides on behalf of their customers. For instance, hotels are able to now purchase rides on behalf of their guests, property developers can enable rides for their customers to and from their sites, and many others.
What breakthroughs in corporate travel have you achieved?
While we are unable to name names, we have partnered with thousands of large-scale organisations globally to provide strong and relevant data points for the impact U4B has been able to bring about in their industries.
