The concept of one electronic device to handle a complete list of tasks, from phone calls and emails, to real-time flight notifications to acting as a boarding pass, is becoming more feasible, though the majority of business travellers still carry multiple mobile devices. In fact, as I sat in a session at ACTE’s Spring Global Education Conference, an audience poll of approximately 160 people yielded that 80 percent admitted to carrying two or more mobile devices. The following article details the features of some existing products that can help business travellers maintain contact with the office, airport, travel agent and even receive the latest weather updates.
The ACTE Global Education Conference program in Rome will offer strategies for the bold, as well as new perspectives for those requiring a more traditional approach to problem-solving. In addition, demand management alternatives, such as teleconferencing and mobile communications, will be explored for companies who are ready to embrace this technological innovation.
The education session, “New Technologies for Business Travel,” will focus in on the two hottest technologies that are seeing rapid deployment across the globe in the business travel sector: videoconferencing and mobile devices enabled with business travel applications. Driven by both demand management and value management, videoconferencing capabilities are increasingly being offered in many companies as a less costly alternative to travel.
Likewise, mobile travel applications have the potential to reduce transaction costs and enable traveller productivity. In this session, attendees will learn about the range of current videoconferencing offerings, case study results from a travel program that has integrated videoconferencing into its travel/meetings program, and business travel applications available for mobile use.
If you already have a mobile device, now would be a good time to add the following dates into your calendar so you don’t miss out on any of the European education events ACTE will be hosting this fall.
Going mobile
In a not so distant future, the scene at a crowded airport terminal will be quite different from what it is today. Business travellers will no longer have to search for flight information on video monitors or stand in line at customer service desks in the wake of a flight cancellation or delay. Instead, they’ll be consulting their mobile devices.
That’s the scenario painted by Yoni Meiri, director of product management mobile for Rearden Commerce, whose on-line booking and concierge product, Personal Assistant, is going mobile. The Foster City, California, company, which has more than 1,250 clients using Personal Assistant, is currently in the process of securing several corporate accounts, including a large UK-based pharmaceutical company, for a test run of Rearden Mobile.
“The interactive itinerary is now in your pocket,” says Meiri, adding that the potential for mobile travel services in the corporate marketplace is enormous. As clients sign up, Rearden loads in their preferred suppliers, enabling a traveller, for example, to book the preferred car service or locate the preferred off-airport parking lot with the push of a button. Later this year, Rearden will enable customers to get reduced rates on long distance roaming services in foreign countries, bringing mobile computing to overseas destinations. Traveller ratings and recommendations will also be added. And when GPS capability is built into a device, useful travel information, such as directions to a nearby restaurant from the traveller’s present location, will automatically be prompted to the PDA or phone.
Rearden, however, isn’t alone. MobiMate, an Israeli company, launched a beta version of a similar product, called WorldMate Live, for Blackberry users last October. WorldMate Live integrates with calendars and email as well as dozens of Internet sources to provide data to mobile travellers, including flight details, information about rental cars, hotels, meetings and local time and weather. A dozen companies have signed up for the service, the largest being British American Tobacco with 700 users, according to Glen Arndt, senior director of corporate sales at MobiMate.
Travellers log onto the service on their Blackberry using a password. The itinerary is synced from their desktop to the mobile device, and back systems link the flight information to the real-time alerts. In the near future, restaurant reservations and flight bookings will be added to the menu of services. The company also looks to expand the service to Windows Mobile Platform in the spring, says Arndt.
“We’re empowering business travellers,” notes Ian Berman, vice president of business development for WorldMate Live. “They don’t have to search for anything anymore. We give them information immediately before they get stuck.” With more than 10 million people using Blackberries and an equal number using Windows Mobile, “the impact on the travel industry is huge,” he adds.
Value of telephony
According to a May 2007 study on mobile travel data by Forrester Research, a sizeable minority of business travellers are already utilizing their mobile devices to obtain travel data. Out of the 87 percent of North American business travellers with mobile phones, 45 percent use mobile data services, such as text messaging and the Internet. Fifty-seven percent of the mobile phone business users surveyed said they’d find it helpful to get airport traffic alerts in a text message before arriving at the airport ,and 39 percent said they’d find it helpful to be able to book a flight on their mobile device.
In another Forrester report on the mobile market for U.S. business travellers, released in December 2007, participants rated being able to check in and check out using their mobiles devices as the most valuable service. The second most useful function was using their phones as room keys or boarding passes. (As a move toward adopting a new IATA standard for boarding pass barcodes, precluding the need for paper, Air Canada last September became the first carrier enabling travellers to flash the barcode at the gate from their mobile phones.)
Skeptics will note that talk about turning the mobile device into an omnipresent provider of travel services has been going on ever since travellers began using smart phones and PDAs. The difficulty of accessing the Web using the device’s tiny keyboards and small screens has been a barrier, as has the fragmentation of the mobile industry, which is characterized by differing types of devices, operating systems and carriers. Travellers’ reluctance to pay for such services and concerns about security of the wireless networks are two other issues, according to the December 2007 Forrester Research report.
However, the popularity of the Blackberry device among business travellers is providing the necessary critical mass for investment in tailoring a product to a particular system. Another impetus is Blackberry’s “all-you-can-eat” pricing model, which doesn’t charge by the transaction, notes Meiri of Rearden.
Meiri and Arndt stressed a crucial difference between their services and the proliferation of mobile Web links and text messaging services offered by airlines, TMCs, on-line booking companies and other travel suppliers: both WorldMate Live and Rearden Mobile utilize technology that requires software to be installed on the device, which is richer and more reliable than the wireless application protocol of those other services. Because WAP utilises a voice network, backups can occur when there’s bad weather or a crisis due to the lines getting jammed.
Because of the software installation, when the Blackberry network went down for three hours on 11 February, WorldMate Live and Rearden Mobile users were still able to check their itineraries, said company spokespeople. And because Rearden Mobile is delivered through the data network of the local service provider, not the RIM network, service was unaffected, said Dan Ford, Rearden Commerce’s vice president of marketing.
A statement from Research in Motion, the company behind the device, said: “Blackberry data services in the Americas experienced intermittent delays on late Monday afternoon (beginning approximately 3:30 pm eastern). Data service levels were restored in the early evening at approximately 6:30 pm eastern. Voice and SMS services operated normally during this time.
“No messages were lost and message queues began to be cleared after normal service levels were restored. RIM continues to focus on providing industry-leading reliability in its products and services and apologizes to customers for any inconvenience.”
Arndt said such outages might call into question the reliability of the device. But he noted that WorldMate Live is being launched in two other systems, Windows Mobile and Symbian, this year, so there will be other options.
Such services are also less expensive, according to the providers. WorldMate charges individual users of its product an annual fee of $100, with a 20 percent discount available to companies with 10 users or more. Rearden Mobile customers are charged a one-time service fee.
The value proposition to the CTM is the convenience of the services, says Meiri. Travellers will become more productive since they don’t have to waste time standing in line. The convenience of the mobile travel services also helps compliance, since it’s easiest for travellers to select those suppliers that come up on their screens. “The experience of complying will become so irresistible that travellers, “Won’t be able to imagine operating any other way. I call it ‘compliance without the tears,’” said Meiri.
Growing demand
Meanwhile, TMCs, on-line booking services and other travel suppliers are hustling to offer travel data services geared to road warriors’ mobile devices. Orbitz’s TLC umbrella of services, for example, enables mobile phone users to check their flight status and last minute availability of a hotel, as well as receive airport information and traveller alerts from the booking services’ proprietary staff of former air traffic control and airline employees, explains Orbitz spokesperson Jim Cohn. Orbitz can alert users about a potential delay either by text message, email or phone call, information that can also be pushed to six other contacts specified by the traveller.
Cohn said more than 2,000 corporate customers had signed up for Orbitz TLC, which entails no extra charge beyond Orbitz’s standard booking fee. In November 2007, Travelocity unveiled a mobile service that enables travelers to access travel information using their Web-enabled mobile device. And this year, GetThere will introduce a mobile service geared toward the corporate market, called GetThere2Go. It will enable business travellers to book and manage trips by accessing their corporation’s travel site on their mobile devices. GetThere is partnering with Usablenet, Inc., a major provider of mobile travel services, for the new product.
“We’ve got a lot of interest from global companies,” says Suzanne Neufang, GetThere’s vice president of customer experience. According to Neufang, the potential for mobile travel services is huge, given the thousands of people using smart phones. In the near future, she expects the introduction of “browser capable devices” will further open the market.
Other services, such as Infotriever, based in Toronto, have long been integrating and updating travel itinerary information, which is then synched into the calendar on a traveller’s mobile device. Infotriever offers its services through a variety of partners, including Sabre, Amadeus, Cornerstone and GDSX. TMCs are also getting into the act: Carlson Wagonlit’s Freedom, for example, which works with any type of GDS, provides driving directions, alternative flight data, and concierge-type services, such as nearby coffee shops, to travellers’ smart phones. The service reduces costs by eliminating more expensive calls to travel agents and driving more business to preferred suppliers.
Joel Hanson, CWT product manager in North America, says the demand for Freedom had grown from zero, several years ago, to a million transactions a year. “We try to make it as personalized as possible,” as well as synch changes in the itinerary to the traveller’s calendar. Currently geared to North American travellers, Freedom will be expanded globally at the beginning of 2009.
TRX’s on-line corporate booking tool RESX is also going mobile. According to Shane Hammond, president of RESX Technologies, the latest release of the tool includes a mobile application, accessed through a URL that provides travellers with instant on-demand access to their trip information via their mobile devices, including flight status and gate information.
Not all observers are convinced the business case for mobile travel services has been made. “I have a chorus of travellers asking for this, and CTMs are beginning to be curious about it,” relates Alan Minton, vice president of marketing and account management at Cornerstone, which delivers mobile travel itineraries on behalf of TMCs. “If procurement is spending money, they’re saying ‘give me the ROI, whatever the technology is.’”
Some service providers say mobile travel services will never replace the office. Although WorldMate will be introducing on-device booking in the future, Berman expects it to be most useful for making changes on the road. “Our vision is crisis management.” He notes that interest from Fortune 500 companies is tied to possible applications related to expense accounting and safety and security, which could be built off the WorldMate Live platform that enables the CTM and traveller to communicate.
Arndt says part of his pitch to CTMs is the immediate opportunities in cost savings. He recently met with a CTM based in New York City with 2,500 travellers in the U.S., who informed him that the company pays $35 each time a traveller picks up the phone to ask the TMC if the flight is on time. “In two calls, you’ve paid for the annual license for our product,” Arndt notes.
Furthermore, because companies have already invested significant IT dollars in their mobile devices, they’re motivated to maximise the usage. “CTMs need to look at leveraging the wireless technology,” concludes Arndt. “The devices have come a long way, and now companies can really consider these new applications.”
