The perfect trip is at your fingertips

In an increasingly globalised business world, business travel is the fortifying force that strengthens relationships across borders.

Business travel gives employees the crucial face time necessary to build better business relationships and extend the company’s reach into new markets.

But for some, the experience of business travel has not evolved in step with the growing need to undertake it.

The old way of doing business travel will be familiar to most people.

Booking airline tickets, hotels and rental cars only through the approved channels (even if these channels don’t yield the most cost efficient or preferred options), managing expense claiming by collecting a multitude of paper receipts and agonising over their remediation post-trip and playing the waiting game when it comes to dealing with flight delays often seems, disappointingly, standard. 

As business travel becomes increasingly integrated in the way businesses operate, the old way of undertaking it should give way to a new era of more seamless, easy travelling.

This is an era where travel operates within an ecosystem that dynamically responds to the needs of business travellers, the companies that they work for and the suppliers that serve them.

Simplicity is its characteristic. This trip is the kind with no paper or queues, where travellers’ smartphones know their preferences and has pre-booked every step of the journey to blend into the next, where ordering a pickup at the airport before the plane arrives at the gate is instantaneous and where travellers’ phone will check in to their hotel room and even unlock the door.

This vision for such an easy business trip is not a far removed fantasy, given the transformative potential of mobile and social technologies.

This potential finds manifestation in Concur’s TripIt mobile app.

TripIt is a tool that helps business travellers take the first step toward embracing the future of business travel.

TripIt can: 

• organise trip details into one master online itinerary — even if arrangements are booked at multiple travel sites
• automatically include maps, directions, and weather in a master itinerary
• have the option to book restaurants, theatre tickets, activities and more right from within the online itinerary
• safely access travel plans online, share them, check-in for flights, or print an itinerary
• keep abreast of changes to flight schedules, allowing travellers to re-book their own flights via their mobile device and communicate their changed itinerary to the business.

The new era of business travel has dawned and TripIt is at the helm of change, simplifying the travel experience one download and fingertip manoeuvre at a time… 

This is the second in a series of columns contributed by Marten Jagers, Senior Director, Asia Pacific at Concur, a leading provider of integrated travel and expense management solutions.

Marten Jagers

Marten Jagers is Senior Director, Asia Pacific at Concur, a leading provider of integrated travel and expense management solutions (www.concur.com)