Suppliers eyeing growth in the corporate travel business are relying on enhanced mobile products and services to address and engage travellers in areas such as duty of care and compliance, as well as enhance the traveller experience.
Travelport’s Chris Ramm, vice president Asia Pacific, air commerce, shared the travel technology company was seeing an acceleration in expectations of a travel experience that was as easy and engaging as the best retailers, products and services in the world.
Ramm noted: “Our Global Digital Traveler Research 2019, which surveyed 23,000 people from 20 countries, showed that 45 per cent of travellers – up nine per cent on 2018 – get frustrated when they are unable to access their booking information round-the-clock on mobile devices.”
Moreover, Ramm revealed that Travelport’s Mobile Travel Trends 2020 report supported this mobile shift, as “87 per cent of respondents downloaded more travel apps this year than they did last year”.
Among customers that have intensified their mobile engagement are BCD Travel and easyJet, according to Ramm.
BCD Travel’s strategy is to provide anytime access to trip information and tools from any connected device. In collaboration with Travelport, it recently launched its next-gen mobile platform to leverage traveller engagement to satisfy corporate travel programme needs such as duty of care and programme compliance.
Travelport claims the native iOS and Android app TripSource is the highest-rated, most-reviewed TMC app in the Apple App Store, with over 900k app downloads, four-plus-star average app rating and over 94 per cent returning users YoY.
With easyJet’s growing focus on business and loyalty-related offerings, Ramm said the British budget airline was extending the mobile app’s functionality to offer holiday packages and rewards which are key strategic developments to grow the app’s loyal user base.
Mobile innovations easyJet has introduced include an augmented reality cabin-bag sizer to scan and check if carry-on luggage is within the airline’s dimensions, while Speak Now finds fights in a few seconds instead of 12 taps of the smartphone.
The mobile app is delivering nearly US$750 million in booking revenue annually and growing, and approximately 21 per cent of all easyJet bookings are now done via the easyJet app.
Users, Ramm noted, also used the app to generate and use 561,000 mobile boarding passes in the last week of November 2019, more than 271,000 passports were scanned in the same month, and more than 499,000 check-in bags were added to bookings as of end November 2019.
