Social Media and Marketing

A new research has indicated that corporate travel professionals are increasingly using social media to communicate with travellers and to stay on top of latest travel industry information.

Published: 22 Jul 2010

A new research has indicated that corporate travel professionals are increasingly using social media to communicate with travellers and to stay on top of latest travel industry information.

The latest research report “Social Media in Business Travel Management” by American Express Business Travel’s eXpert has revealed that social media has “proven to be a useful and effective tool to share pertinent information with employees and drive change in organisations”. Also, it is encouraging to see corporate travel departments becoming more comfortable with this form of collaboration.

According to American Express Business Travel, respondents also reported high expectations regarding their companies’ future social media usage plan, reporting that within the next year forums, webcasts, and online video are the most likely to be implemented by businesses.

Role in Corporate Travel

Social media has evolved to play a role in business travel programmes. While half (50%) of respondents said that they use social media to some extent to support travel management today, mid-size companies ($3M to $10M USD in air volume) were the largest adopters (59%) of social media to support business travel management to date.

Many respondents indicated that the primary benefit of social media in supporting managed travel is educating themselves or their organisation about the market. In fact, 44 percent indicated that staying on top of the latest travel information was the most important social media benefit. This response was followed closely by the interest in using social networking to learn and communicate best practices and reduce business travel costs (43%).

Other findings include:

• 42% use social networking to look for preferred vendors and services from travellers
• 34% seek to uncover travel patterns that could lend to better vendor rates and services
• 27% look to gain visibility into traditionally siloed business functions/departments
• 26% use social media tools to encourage travelers to network with each other
• 18% network with other travel manager/procurement officer peers

Of those survey respondents who do use social media to support travel management, when asked specifically what features or functionality would they add if they could design their own social media tools for professional use, the majority (61%) indicated they wanted flexibility to accommodate business travel management processes.

Other top ranking features/functionality include:

• Real time updates such as mobile application, the ability to push out notifications and alerts (39%)
• Supervision of the entire social media sharing process and specific monitoring of those who are using social media tools (35%)
• Reporting ability – notification to website abuse, comments and security issues (29%)