Skip to main content

Role of Travel Management Companies During Crisis

Business travel management in a time of crisis

3 min
Posted: 08 September 2021
Business-travel-during-crisis.jpg

By Mark Hollyhead, chief operating officer and SVP customer success 

You spoke. We listened.

As the COVID-19 pandemic captures headlines around the world, we’ve been working hard to give you the corporate travel tools, travel advice, and information you need to stay ahead. This is a constantly evolving situation, and part of our job is to listen to you to get a better understanding of your changing business and travel management needs. And that’s what we’ve been doing — listening, learning, and quickly adapting our tools and customer service experience.

What we’ve heard:

You need faster response times

We’re making every effort to keep you and your corporate travelers safe while keeping our teams safe, too. All of our customer support agents are now equipped to help you from their homes, meaning we’re fully staffed to give you quicker response times to meet your business travel management needs.

More self-service options 

We moved quickly to enable online self-service, penalty-free cancellation for original, non-refundable corporate hotel rates. Plus, corporate travelers can now see all of their itineraries, select which one they need help with, and submit the request in a few clicks.

Traveler tracker is a great tool — can it do more?

We’ve made some updates to support travel risk management, including extended search capabilities to allow global searches by country, city, or a custom region drawn on a map. We also added the ability to look back 30 days to assess travel in COVID-19 hotspots.

Help to gain insights on the financial impact to your business 

Check out the COVID-19 travel reporting hub in Egencia Analytics Studio. These reports give you access to downloadable data for all of your air and hotel bookings. These travel reports are customizable for any future date ranges through the end of 2020.

Support in planning for the relaunch of your business travel program

We’ve launched the Benchmarking dashboard in Analytics Studio. This gives you the ability to benchmark your business against similar companies on travel spend or benchmark against countries where you’ve booked travel. This will give you a better understanding of how your current travel program is performing, and where you can optimize. We also want to thank you: Our recent traveler manager survey showed that these updates are making your lives easier — and our goal is always to be there with you, every step of the way.

What’s next?

We’re continuing to work hard to meet more of your requests, here are some of the updates we’re working on:

  • Increased travel advice and knowledge sharing from us and your peers to help you stay informed. Check out our new supercharged Connect Community.
  • More tools to help you plan for the relaunch of your corporate travel program.
  • We’re working with our business travel network and suppliers to improve the ability to make name changes across bookings.
  • We’re also focused on making it easier for you to view and utilize unused tickets.

Stay tuned as we work to bring you more to make business travel easy, enjoyable, and enriching for your business. And if you have any suggestions for us, please contact your account manager.

Keep up to date

We have a dedicated Help Center  that offers travel managers, arrangers, and business travelers a destination where they can find information to stay updated on COVID-19 and how it’s impacting corporate travel. Our Help Center provides a summary of all airline, hotel, and rail flexible travel policies and information on cancellations and rebooking.

Was this content helpful?
0

Looking for better business travel solutions? Get in touch with us.