Coronavirus pandemic: Innovating at speed to support business travel
By Alex Kaluzny, chief product and technology officer
We're experiencing a pandemic unlike any other. Having experienced worldwide travel disruptions and outbreaks, including the SARS virus and Ebola, we know that the ability to listen to customer needs and quickly respond makes a significant difference to how effectively we support travel managers and business travelers.
At Egencia, our culture has always been, and continues to be, one of customer-centric innovation, but the COVID-19 pandemic has reinforced this even more. Unlike many other TMCs, we build and operate our own tech stack. With fast access to our data for insights, we have reacted immediately to deliver new capabilities as fast as in a few hours — sometimes it's literally the difference between getting business travelers back home or having them stranded.
All of the following enhancements were launched at the same time worldwide and localized in 15 languages to ensure we're supporting all of our customers around the world.
Duty of care during COVID-19
COVID-19 has amplified the importance of duty of care in new and uncharted ways. Travel managers and human resources (HR) colleagues need to understand where their travelers are scheduled to be — and where they’ve been, functionality provided by Egencia Traveler Tracker.
Based on usage data and customer feedback, three days before World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a pandemic, we enhanced Traveler Tracker to allow travel managers to search for their travelers by more parameters. They can now search globally, by country, by city, or by a custom region drawn on a map.
At the same time, it also became apparent very quickly that the unique nature of the coronavirus meant that it's critical for a travel manager to also know where their travelers have recently been. We also rolled out a ‘look backward’ capability in Traveler Tracker. Travel managers can now search the last 30 days to see where travelers have been to better understand if they may have been near or in a high risk COVID-19 area.
Fast-track support
As this outbreak has evolved, so have we. We’ve long had travel alerts for travel disruptions such as hurricanes, strikes or other critical incidents, but now our teams went all out to ensure that in every touch point our clients and travelers were getting access to the information they need to make decisions and take actions.
We accelerated updates, including new features and tips that help business travelers take control of their trips. We’ve been working tirelessly to connect business travelers with Egencia travel consultants in new ways so that we can help all the travelers that need us. For instance, we built an online form that travelers can fill in to cancel bookings. We developed a process to cancel bookings in bulk for clients who have made the hard decision to cancel all travel for their company or travel in certain regions.
We’ve been working closely with our supplier partners as they continue to evolve their policies to provide more flexible cancellations. We have been sharing regular updates on flexible rebooking and cancelation policies from our airline, hotel, rail, and car partners as they occur — a mean feat given the pace of change. In addition, we've ensured that these are reflected in our platform and enable travelers to cancel their previously non-refundable bookings online.
In these extraordinary times, we're helping our customers navigate the unexpected. Through the Egencia Help Center, we're working around the clock to get travelers, travel managers, and the general public the latest information on travel. For those that are still on the road or maybe required to travel, we’re making further enhancements to the mobile app to ensure they have all the same real-time COVID-19 alert information via their phone as they do on their desktop.
And when booking a trip, we’ve included the ability to filter hotel search results to show those with flexible cancellation policies and added a live banner in the hotel search interface that directs travelers to those.
Never stopping
At Egencia we support customers in more than 60 countries around the world. We also have global support on the ground with our 3,000-strong force of travel consultants that speak over 30 languages and provide real-time support for travelers 24/7/365. We’ve committed to a "follow the sun model" across our company so that we can support travel managers and business travelers around the world as quickly and efficiently as possible. This approach means our teams work across multiple time zones, with one team delivering their part of a new innovation and then handing it off to another team as they start their day, ensuring that the innovation never stops, even for the rising and setting of the sun.
These are just a few of the rapid improvements we’ve rolled out to help our customers while their business travelers are on the road and to help travel managers to uphold their duty of care obligations during this challenging time. We’re proud to be able to deliver rapid innovations and serve our customers to ensure they have a successful trip from planning to traveling and returning home safely.
