IN-DEPTH: BCD Travel on mobile travel tools

Published: 01 Sep 2009

IN-DEPTH: BCD Travel on mobile travel tools

Corporate travel management companies are embracing social and mobile travel tools, offering their corporate clients options to receive itineraries which are easy to organise and customise.

Recently, BCD Travel signed an agreement with TripIt. The company will transfer a traveller’s booking to TripIt, which delivers a master itinerary to the traveller’s personal TripIt account. BCD Travel plans to begin offering TripIt services in early 2010.

In order to know more about the utility of mobile functionalities, EyeforTravel.com’s Ritesh Gupta spoke to April Bridgeman, senior vice president at BCD Travel. Excerpts:

How do you the assess the maturity level of mobile functionalities in the travel industry?

April Bridgeman: The industry has matured quite a bit in the past year in fact. In areas where we previously saw numerous players bringing similar features to the table, we’re now seeing some clear leaders in SMS distribution, journey assistance, mobile content and location-based services.

All of the players should have a great interest in working together to create a travel experience that links together the features that are most important to that user at a given point in the journey and I think we’ll see that more in the future. While the mobile itinerary and trip alerts area are relatively mature, serious development has only begun in certain areas of the mobile arena. In terms of GPS and location-based services, we’ve only begun to scratch the surface of opportunities like geo-targeted marketing, travel disruption recovery, and personal safety and well being.

One thing is obvious is that there is a long way to go. We’re plagued by a great deal of fragmentation in these types of mobile services and the winner will be the provider that brings together the relevant services at the right time where the user expects them to be.

Where do you think mobile phones fit in the distribution strategy of travel suppliers especially hotels and airlines?

April Bridgeman: Let’s set the concept of shop/book aside for a moment. There’s debate as to when shopping and buying on a mobile device is really something that can be effective. Where we think users will see the most benefit in the shorter term is in what we consider “journey interruption” bookings. Enabling a user to quickly find and book a hotel if their flight is cancelled is something we expect to see soon. Booking an alternate flight when you have a cancellation or adding a hotel or car service to a booking if your air plans change. Also, travel suppliers would be missing a huge opportunity if they don’t use mobile services, and potentially location-based services, to market services to travellers when they’re in the terminal or on the aircraft like upgrades, food, duty free, lounge access, or ground transportation.

Where do you think current opportunities lie considering consumer touch points or travel planning/ booking process?

April Bridgeman: It depends on which area of the globe we are talking about. Mobile browsing outranks desktop browsing 3:1 in parts of Asia. They might leapfrog the concept of a desktop browser-based experience and create leaner, context aware targeted products to address a marketplace that often doesn’t have a home computer. That being said, mobile browsing is the only way to enable a mobile experience without fussing with multiple platforms like Blackberry, Android and iPhone (not to mention Global brands not used in the US) which is difficult and costly.

What’s your opinion regarding mobile screen vs PC debate? What do you think are pros and cons at this stage which one needs to consider to ensure mobile-related efforts get optimal results?

April Bridgeman: The place to start is by viewing your mobile channel alongside your other service channels. Successful innovators will find a way to harmonise these channels so that they unfold over time for a user. The desktop browsing experience is a great place to view rich, multi-media content and that is valuable to our users during the research, planning and booking phase of a trip.

On the other hand, hotel directions, phone numbers, and GPS enabled services will serve our users better on the go, using a mobile device. Still other services may work better for travellers, like using automated speech to deliver audio itinerary recaps on demand or determine the ID and intent of the caller to best service the call. The last point I will make is that for a mobile strategy to be effective, we need to develop tools that are relevant to users both within the managed travel programme and outside the business travel experience. Today’s travellers don’t appreciate the disconnection we’ve created between the personal and business aspects of travel. They are desperate for some harmony in all of this.

Airline mobile web services have centered around making available flight schedules, fares, plus destination and airport information for all mobile phone users. What new trends have you witnessed in this arena?

April Bridgeman: Clearly, the most attention is being paid to mobile paperless boarding passes and I would imagine that the same airlines that drove the e-ticket revolution a decade ago and self-service kiosks in the past few years will do the same with mobile boarding passes. The most interesting thing we see is how travel suppliers are capitalising on marketing and up-selling using mobile communication. If an airline knows the flight you are on has available first class seats, you can expect an SMS to sell you one. Same goes for other on-board amenities like preferred seats, meals, entertainment, duty free, wireless access and others. One could imagine a future where these types of marketing efforts were driven off of GPS technology, rather than the timeline of the trip. Perhaps certain messaging would be delivered when a user arrives on the airport property or arrives at the gate for boarding. I would guess that personal boarding invitations and things like a notification that your preferred seat has opened up while you are walking through the airport aren’t far off either.

How fast will the mobile channel grow?

April Bridgeman: The pace is just now picking up. The interesting thing about the mobile channel is that the innovation is literally hindered only by the ingenuity of the masses. With open source, cloud computing and “citizen developers” out there, all of them are out there creating new products to solve problems.

A great example is the most obvious. The iPhone App Store changes everything in that it’s up to the user to select among thousands of applications and customise their iPhone to meet their exact needs. The challenge for travel management companies will be to fold in our own products and services into the mobile channel in a way that makes sense to the user and is in harmony with that user’s lifestyle and business travel preferences and limitations.

Travel Distribution Summit N. America 2009

April Bridgeman is scheduled to speak at EyeforTravel’s Travel Distribution Summit North America 2009 to be held in Chicago (September 16-17) this year.

For more information, click here:
http://events.eyefortravel.com/tdsusa/conference/

or contact:

Helen Raff
VP North America
+44 (0) 207 375 7582 (UK)
helen@eyefortravel.com