ANALYSIS: Going mobile (Sep 10)

Seven out of ten business travellers now use smartphones.  Research from PhoCusWright suggests this new technology will reshape business travel.

A study by industry researchers PhoCusWright has identified seven key trends which are likely to have far reaching implications for business travel. One trend in particular, the increasing use of mobile technology, is already affecting every level of the corporate travel process from suppliers down to individual travellers.

Susan Steinbrink, senior research and corporate market analyst at PhoCusWright and co-author of its mobility study, said new research showed seven in ten business travellers are now using smartphones and other similar mobile devices.

"That's certainly an indication of use from a professional and personal standpoint. It's clearly becoming an integral part of communication for business travellers," she said.

Ms Steinbrink described the potential of this constantly evolving area of technology as "huge" with travel technology providers vigorously exploring ways to deliver location-based information, potentially using the inbuilt GPS technology.

Susan Steinbrink

Expense management companies such as Concur and KDS have for some time extolled the virtues of the mobile device as a way to capture expenses while on the go. Indeed both Concur and KDS, major names in the US and European markets, are bringing out products tailored for mobile devices in an attempt to provide "total end-to-end expense management".

Ms Steinbrink said: "The technology is evolving with increased capabilities such as location-based services and further down the road the ability to serve as a payment vehicle to capture expenses.

"The potential is pretty huge, especially for many of the long term unmanaged expenses that corporate travellers incur as they travel."

Norman Rose, senior corporate and technology analyst at PhoCusWright and the mobile study's other co-author, said it was important to think of mobility as a new platform in the travel chain.  

This slightly more abstract concept allows the true value within new hardware to be realised.

Technology vendors, often through third-party partners, are driving innovation by creating new mobile applications, no longer "one step behind the curve" as Mr Rose put it. He gave the example of BCD Travel which last month announced a deal with TripIt to provide "master" itineraries, weather forecasts, maps, directions and other relevant information direct to a traveller's mobile device.

Another example Mr Rose offered was Concur's partnership with RideCharge, a service which gives users access to a network of city-based taxis and chauffeur-driven limousines in the US. The deal allows users to find, book, pay and now record it all in the expense management process all through a mobile application.

"This is something completely new that we have not seen in the marketplace before and it's a great example of how connectivity can be improved through mobile devices," Mr Rose added.

Both Ms Steinbrink and Mr Rose singled out location-based services and expense management as two key areas where mobility would have the greatest long-term effect. Optical character recognition (OCR), which has itself been around for some years now, is set to revolutionise the way miscellaneous travel receipts are handled, Mr Rose said.

Travellers can already take pictures of receipts and send them in with expense reports. OCR allows those receipts to be read, digitised and correctly allocated to the traveller. Concur and KDS are not the only expense management companies to recognise the value of this and market it as a key service feature. Spendvision is another expense company which claims to have led the drive to bring in this form of receipt capture.

Importantly, mobility is bringing together two worlds which have remained separate in the minds of the traveller, that of business and leisure. The iPhone, a consumer "must have" and the BlackBerry, a corporate workhorse, exemplify the blurring of this division. The BlackBerry has long been favoured by the corporate traveller for its business-orientated features. But more business applications, or "apps", are coming out on the iPhone every month. In answer to this, new types of BlackBerry are being released which use iPhone-like large touch screens and offer applications through a distinctly Apple-flavoured "app store".

But Ms Steinbrink and Mr Rose said social networking, another frontier of new technology, was fast being adopted by business travellers, buyers and suppliers as a means to send news out to the masses, and vice versa. Twitter, in which short messages or "tweets" are broadcast to a network of contacts, is often still dismissed as a fad due to its pervasiveness among the young and the famous. But a closer look at who's on Twitter reveals many important tweeters from the across the travel chain such as CWT, KDS and large network carriers including Lufthansa and Air France.

Norman Rose

"The other big change that's obviously happening in the market place that may not be thought about in the mobile context is the social networking aspect," Mr Rose said.

"From a corporate perspective, being able to immediately comment on a restaurant or hotel and feed that information back to the corporate travel department and the travel management company is really a new experience and opportunity."

Mr Rose said the industry is moving into an environment where travel departments and agencies no longer have to wait to receive information from travellers, it can be pushed out to them and suppliers instantly.

But who will ultimately drive mobile adoption or cause it to stumble? Company travel departments weigh up the pros and cons of new technology all the time, and policy dictates may prove a barrier to mobile adoption. But it is also a matter of personal preference with travellers choosing not to use all the new (and sometimes expensive) features available to them.

As Ms Steinbrink argued, it is ultimately a matter of relevance. Relevance in the mind of the traveller could affect the apparent ROI of new mobile technology.

Ms Steinbrink said: "If you remember the evolution of the online booking tool, it became apparent that to be successful and render the penetration they needed, it was of absolute importance for the traveller to embrace the tool.

"These different advantages centre on the fact that travel policy and preferred suppliers will always and absolutely trump personal preferences. However, to be successful these programmes have to be traveller orientated."

Business travel choices are increasingly coming under the remit of the procurement department and out of the hands of the individual. As this happens, the cost and time of shopping for travel through a mobile device will come under closer scrutiny. Other benefits such as convenience while out and about may not be enough to justify the cost of services offered through mobile devices and problems with international data rates.

But Ms Rose added finally: "The traveller needs to be able to see it being relevant to their needs and valuable. I think with the number of applications that are in the pipeline that relevance will come more quickly."