travel tech insights

Today’s travel companies often find themselves in the same scenario as companies within a host of other industries: The prospect of having to do more with less.

Because the 21st Century travel industry demands travel companies operate with greater agility, flexibility, and visibility, travel companies are constantly tasked with increasing efficiency, reducing costs, and enhancing the overall customer experience in order to remain viable and competitive. With such a crowded field in today’s travel landscape, travel companies  can find themselves struggling to navigate the wealth of options, methods, and modes when it comes to increasing the efficacy of their products and services.

This is where a travel ERP solution is an important value proposition for travel companies as they strive to multi-task and work faster and more efficiently. The capacity of a travel ERP solution to automate workflows and back-office tasks, and fast, accurate invoicing and documentation reduce headaches for travel companies by streamlining once manual, time-consuming activities. This provides travel companies with greater visibility and responsiveness across each touch point of the value chain.

If there’s one segment of the global travel industry that has continued to show potential for growth and development during the last five years, it’s corporate travel. As more countries emerge as hubs of international business and the global business community continues to align, the sheer number of corporate travelers and their impact on the travel industry has been a truly disruptive force pushing travel companies to modernize their practices and tailor products and services to this new breed of traveler.

In today’s travel industry, numbers don’t lie. Facts and data points are taken as gospel when evaluating the strength of the travel industry and what industry trends may have the biggest impact on what the travel landscape looks like six, nine, or 12 months in the future. For example, a recent survey from the Global Business Travel Association projected the total revenue generated from international business travel would reach  nearly $1 trillion dollars.

A recent report from the travel industry advocacy group EyeforTravel asked 183 respondents across all omareas of the global travel industry landscape about what facet of the travel industry keeps them up most nights. It’s an interesting question, especially given how volatile and variant-rich today’s travel industry can be taken into account the sheer volume of suppliers and network partners. Even so, the overwhelming response to this question was the need to stay ahead of technology and keep pace with the development of new digital platforms or methods of doing business. And this is especially true for mobile bookings and ability of today’s traveler to source, research, and complete bookings on devices no bigger than the palm of their hand.

In fact, EyeforTravel’s May 2016 survey and resulting report identified a number of interesting statistics regarding the continued development of mobile technology that can be applied to travel agents, tour operators, product and service providers, and even consumers.

With the first month of 2017 nearly behind us, there have been numerous articles about the trends, storylines, and narratives likely to emerge in the travel industry during the next year; in fact, we’ve recently published a handful of entries along similar lines in order to discover where the travel industry is headed and why 2016 was such a critical year across nearly all touch points of the travel landscape. While these forecasts and predictions are interesting in terms of plotting what 2017 might look like, they offer very little in terms practical changes to the industry in specific or targeted areas.

While the idea of booking travel accommodations is most certainly a broad topic, travel bookings are poised to undergo some significant shifts in the coming year, both through the adoption of intelligent search and booking engines, but also in terms of how travel companies position themselves between suppliers and customers in the booking process. In addition, other elements such as the continued growth of mobile technology, emergence of new markets, and further fragmentation of the travel market all add up to some fundamental changes in the way customers complete bookings and travel companies facilitate them.

In a recent entry, we recounted 2016 by looking at some of the biggest trends and storylines of the last year in order to get a glimpse of where the travel industry may be headed in the next 12 months. While many of these narratives are compelling in that they paint a portrait of a complex global industry poised for continued growth, they fail in some sense to show just how impactful 2016 was in terms of hard figures. To put it bluntly, numbers matter and numbers don’t lie, especially in today’s travel landscape where travel companies must work harder than ever before to remain competitive and viable.

Whether you’re discussing the total number of dollars spent globally on inbound travel or the percentage of millennial travelers entering the market for the first time, 2016 presents some fascinating statistics that travel companies and tour operators should pay close attention to as they ramp up for the coming year. Because so much of the travel industry relies on actionable data, these year-end figures and projections perhaps reveal more of the story of 2016 than the trends and stories themselves.