Will This Be the Year Corp Travel Agencies Finally Follow Customers Into Chat?

With the shift to remote working, corporate messaging tools have come of age. The likes of Zoom help colleagues “meet” in person, but many organizations rely on collaboration platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams to connect their dispersed workforce.

Now, corporate travel agencies are being urged to join the party, and bring booking and other services into the chat fold.

“My company’s technology teams are accepting chat as a service channel, so why not for travel?” said Daniel Tallos, an international travel manager.

The Curse of App Fatigue

Travel managers are getting tired of emails, and even their agency’s online booking tools. For their employees, it adds a layer of complexity they don’t need.

The shift to remote work means 45 percent of employees are using more workplace apps than before the pandemic, according to Slack’s The Remote Work Tech Effect report. A majority (69 percent) use 3 to 10 apps daily, while 17 percent juggle more than 10.

One in two employees (55 percent) feel switching between numerous apps eats up time in their workday.

It’s a big problem. Currently, Microsoft Teams has 75 million users, after being marketed as a catch-all solution for people and organizations affected by Covid-19 according to BusinessofApps. Slack has grown to daily active users 12 million last year — a number that could soar following its acquisition by Salesforce.

“I don’t believe travel management companies actually understand how their customers communicate within their business. They force them down an online booking tool, phone or email,” said Gavin Smith, director at Element Technology.

There’s efficiency on both sides at stake here. The pandemic is taking its toll on the larger agencies, with many travel advisors caught up in layoffs and furloughs, so fewer people to answer the phones or deal with emails.

One global travel buyer at a pharmaceutical company said the attraction with a chat feature is that his service level agreement with his agency states email responses will come within 18 hours, but for chat responses it’s within two minutes; the reality is that those interactions actually come back within seconds.

There are two strands. The chatbot concept — where artificial intelligence steps in to deal with requests — is more of a “phone call deflection device”, reckons Smith. There’ll be little natural language processing, as often users will be asked to answer from a set of options.

Chat technology can also connect a user straight to a real person, like a travel advisor.

So Who’s Doing What?

Skift approached several travel management companies for their take, and there’s a lot of disparity.

TripActions, and more recently TravelBank, are among few companies to have built their own Slack apps. For now, they’re more of a notification service, where users are alerted to hotel reservation updates, check-in reminders, flight delays and cancellations, or any travel approvals that need signing off.

But on the legacy side, CWT has been one of the early movers in the messaging arena. Over the past three years it has expanded its communication channels to include Facebook’s Messenger and Workplace tools, and since August 2019 has been plugged into Microsoft Teams. Customers can instantly chat with CWT’s counselors via the myCWT Microsoft Team’s app to amend, book or manage their trip.

“We have seen a healthy volume of clients start to use it … and expect that to gain momentum as and when companies and their employees decide to resume to business travel,” a CWT spokesperson said.

Rival American Express Global Business Travel is also bolstering its messaging arsenal. Last year it bought 30SecondsToFly, a startup specializing in artificial intelligence. It lets users book travel through a virtual assistant, called Claire, on Facebook Messenger, Slack, Skype and SMS.

An Amex GBT spokesperson told Skift it also has iMessage and WhatsApp available globally for its customers and travelers, with Google Chat and Microsoft Teams coming soon.

In August 2018, FCM Travel Solutions integrated Claire into its own mobile travel assistant, called Sam. In October, Amex GBT said no decision had yet been whether FCM would be permitted to continue using it.

But FCM is exploring options. “We have already had discussions around extending the capabilities of Sam in terms of notifications and live chat with our consultants, into communications with other platforms like Slack and Teams,” said John Morhous, chief experience officer at FCM.

More employees are working, and messaging, on the go.

Business travel booking platform Egencia has been tapping into the expertise of its parent company Expedia. For several years, most major leisure brands have been offering chat functionality, but translating what they do into the corporate sphere is more difficult, with data compliance and IT security complexities.

Egencia piloted chat and chatbot functionality for its app and website last year, and has now launched it for clients, and points of sale, in the U.S., UK, France, Norway and Sweden.

“When it comes to this type of data, we didn’t have to start from scratch, we worked with our partners on the consumer side. If you don’t know what people are typing, you won’t be able to train and model,” said Alex Kaluzny, Egencia’s chief technology officer.

Kaluzny wants to make sure this new system, with its natural language processing and other features that give users more control — or “skills” — over their bookings, is working properly before applying it to any external communication platforms.

“We have high penetration with our mobile apps, unlike some competitors, so we prioritized that,” he said. “The way we’ve built it is that it’s a generic way to plug this in, once we get through making sure everybody is able to access it. So for Slack, iMessage and WhatsApp, for example, what we’ll do is have a full feature capability, rather than just being able to talk to a travel consultant.”

It’s Complicated

Then there’s a more extreme case: Expensify is developing an “open-source financial group chat” platform called called Expensify.cash.

“Expensify’s long-term product vision derives from a core belief: payments and chat are the same thing,” said its founder and CEO David Barrett in an email to customers. “Every payment is a structured chat to resolve some kind of debt tension that exists between two people. The way we see it, there is a spectrum of functionality between ‘freeform chat’ and ‘expense management’ — and every form of payment is somewhere on that spectrum.”

In the way Slack operates, Barrett said he wants to use channels, threads and reactions and build a larger system “more akin to a social network than an enterprise system”.

Expensify’s approach is a bewildering one. You can read more of the email here — the company didn’t respond to a request for comment. But the complexities here around the concept of chat highlight broader challenges.

Travel managers can ask their agencies to build bespoke messaging technology, but those agencies also need to weigh up the different regions they operate in, and those customers’ tastes.

“Think about where innovation is happening, it can be unique to certain markets,” said Michelle Frymire, CWT’s president strategy and transformation and chief financial officer. “Our China myCWT launched in January 2020, and the adoption has been incredible because of its integration with WeChat and WeChat Pay. You’ve got to meet the market where the market is. In China people live in WeChat and WePay, and that’s where you have to be.”

Tallos also notes that in the corporate world, bigger companies typically change their collaboration tools fairly often, which puts travel management companies under pressure.

“At the end of the day, it will depend on customer demand for this type of integration,” said FCM’s Morhous. “Our approach to developing tech solutions is customer-centric and we will only explore something if our customers feel that it would make a difference to their needs. Despite industry noise, chat is notoriously difficult to support for the latter scenario, given the complexity and amount of data a traveller, booker or manager needs to make a purchase.”

But with 2021 set to be a challenging year for many corporate travel agencies, offering consumer-style chat options could give them a much needed edge in a competitive market.

“This is one of those things where adoption will really escalate,” said Frymire. “What was a bit of a push strategy has now become both push and pull. I speak with clients often, and it always comes up.”