האם COVID ילמד אותנו כיצד לפשט נסיעות עסקים?

קורט קנקסטדט:

Absolutely. Thanks, Dionne. And we’ve already talked about a few different things with respect to things like, Florence, you talked about pre-travel approval. You talked about the booking tools, what role they play. There’s a lot of information, Dionne, you mentioned that’s out there around where you can go and how to travel and whether you’re safe to travel and the government policies and so forth. And maybe, Paul, I’ll throw this to you then, with all these different moving parts, do you see what’s the role of technology in helping to manage this? Is technology keeping pace with the challenges that COVID’s thrown and then how do you manage all these complexities and also try to simplify the process at the same time? Is that possible coming out of this situation?

פול יקירי:

Yeah. Thank you, Kurt. And, obviously, I completely agree with Florence and Dionne. You can see the complexities out there. You can see travel managers now looking at, for example, direct flights rather than indirect flights. You’re seeing pre-trip approval, but not for costs, but for actual travel. Technology itself lends itself to that and obviously allows for management of that process. You can see also with COVID information. Concur has a tool TripIt that has that information for corporate customers and is constantly updated with vaccinations, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, that you’d expect it to be for the corporate traveler. So, I think technology tools do aid the traveler. But I think in this current environment, the complexity has dramatically increased. So just taking airlines as an example, you’ve got some airlines that have pushed ahead with NDC, where you’ve got other airlines that maybe have sat back a little bit.

So you’ve got almost increased fragmentation of channels coming through of content. You’ve got obviously the restrictions of travel country by country, by country. You’ve got certain global travel policy now. And I think to Florence’s point, you’ve got sort of China now that it’s traveling extensively. Where you’ve got Europe, which is still pretty much maybe 10% of travel maximum. So, you’ve got to manage now a global environment, but a very, very regional basis. So without that technology in place, I think, all of us would struggle within the industry. So from my perspective, certainly, the tools are in place to do some of this. But I think the complexity of actually what we, as an industry, are now dealing with has increased substantially, certainly, over the last 12 to 18 months.

קורט קנקסטדט:

Yeah, no doubt about that. And I guess maybe, Florence, I’ll turn this next one to you. AsFlorence

רוברט:

Yeah. Just before we moving on to the next question. Sorry, Kurt.

קורט קנקסטדט:

No, go for it.

פלורנס רוברט:

What I found interesting when we’re asking whether the technologies is actually taken part into the COVID, I would say it’s starting to come, but it was not there. And as a result, I know that we basically blocked online booking tool pretty much everywhere because they were not able to cope to the level of security and checks that we needed to have in place. And I’m not the only travel manager who made that move. A lot of travel managers have actually switched off the online booking tool during the pandemic crisis and the top of it. As we were saying, China’s traveling a lot, we have our online booking tool back in China, but we don’t have it anywhere else.

And that’s because it’s not yet to the maturity of a market like China, where we’re back to quasi normal, but for all the others, we still not have reactivated our online booking tool and travel agencies are starting to provide some tools like the advisory that Dionne was talking about and some. But it’s still a work in progress. And as a result, everything has been moved back offline. So, we kind of took a slight setback for a lot of travel managers who were pushing for online adaption. And now I’m back to, “No, no, no, you have to go offline.”

קורט קנקסטדט:

Yeah. [crosstalk 00:14:38] Well, that’s interesting point, Florence, because then again, there’s one part of the argument that says that the only way to then manage a complex situation is to make the channels simpler. You take away multiple channels online, offline, email, mobile, et cetera. And you just go offline back to calling an agent and getting advice is.

פלורנס רוברט:

כֵּן.

קורט קנקסטדט:

I mean, but that’s obviously not sustainable post-pandemic, but ultimately is it that the simplification is to make the channels much more narrow at the moment. And are you seeing that there’s benefit to that in the…

פלורנס רוברט:

כן.

קורט קנקסטדט:

ללא שם: כן?

פלורנס רוברט:

Yeah, because an online booking tool is able to book you a flight. It doesn’t give you all the information with regards to PCR tests and so on. And right now the online booking tool have not integrated, for instance, the booking of a PCR test before you’re leaving. So, all those information are still managed on our side by the travel agent offline. So as I said, the travel agency are starting to get forward with that, proposing PCR tests bookings, and that kind of things, but ideally it’s more widely spread out. Yeah, the simplicity was to actually go back offline and to handle everything offline, unfortunately. Yeah.