Today, having had a front-row view of changes in the travel industry, I can now confidently say that personalisation is the future of travel.
Personalisation doesn’t just mean a customised email. It means a completely unique booking and travel experience tailored to each individual. Travellers will go to their favourite booking platform and three flights will surface based on their travel preferences. No searching. No questions. No price comparisons. The traveller can just input the dates and book.
On the road, that traveller can open the platform and recommendations will pop up based on their needs and wants. Whether that’s the quickest way to get to Heathrow Airport in rush hour or the closest Indian restaurant, the experience is seamless and takes personalisation to a new level.
And when a trip is over, travellers shouldn’t have to worry about filing an itemised expense report or finding lost receipts because their solution already knew their personal expense policy and automatically fetched their folio for them.
The same runs true for admin and finance teams. The whole ecosystem wants personalisation and it’s down to the software providers to offer that experience. A CFO should be able to jump into a conversation with a chatbot and have reports that previously would have taken hours to collate – such as looking at company travel spend by department – available in seconds.
Better still, the chatbot would proactively recommend actions the CFO can take to save the company money based on real-time trend analysis and employee behavior. Personalisation is changing the game for businesses and those that learn how to play early will have a massive advantage over their competition.
