"There is a focus on employee engagement and on using data to maximise value by connecting processes and gaining insight from that data.
Supporting your employees in the new normal will be more important than ever and this will require great employee experience as part of the travel process, be that from the authorization, through to booking, travelling and then meeting their associated compliance obligations of travel.
The experience should be connected and place the employee at the heart of it.
For instance, one of the greatest challenges that organisations are seeing in managing business travel at the moment is around the employee engagement and having suitable data to identify travellers.
What was interesting is that 75% of the organisations that took part in our survey said that the single greatest functionality to aid business travel compliance would be to embed the business travel compliance assessment into the travel booking process – a great employee experience - this is something that we also see as key.
This ties into maximising the value of travel data. Not only can the travel data drive other processes like identifying travel compliance and regulatory items, it can also support business initiatives such as sustainability.
I recently saw that Reed & Mackay had launched a new carbon footprint offering as part of the carbon booking process, and this is exactly aligned to the point here around creating employee engagement and using that data for the best purposes possible."