Corporate travel is showing strong signs of recovery, according to Madhavan Menon, Managing Director, Thomas Cook (India) Group, who was the first speaker in Sabre’s new virtual insights series. Speaking as part of the Sabre Ascent series, Menon said that for the month of March 2022, Thomas Cook (India) is seeing a domestic corporate travel recovery of around 70 per cent of pre-pandemic levels, with international corporate travel starting to follow the same trajectory.
His comments mirror the latest figures released by Sabre in its filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, which provides updated recovery figures for the period of 1-28 March compared to the same period in 2019. The Sabre filing said, “While domestic and leisure bookings have continued to lead the recovery, international and corporate bookings have improved at an accelerating rate since January 2022. We expect the March 2022 recovery versus the same period for both international and corporate bookings to be at its highest levels since the pandemic started.”
During the first ever Sabre Ascent session, Menon also told Jaya Kumar K., Vice President and Managing Director, Sabre Bengaluru GCC, that he expects technology to play a “far greater role” in corporate travel as business travellers expect increased, targeted information to help them navigate travel in a COVID-19 world as well as a much more personalised approach. Menon said that Sabre is “leading this crusade of evolving technology in the travel industry, and that is not something that should be underestimated” because his company would not have made so much progress without global distribution technology.
The webinar also addressed the challenges and opportunities brought about by the pandemic, as well as the evolution of domestic tourism, new trends in personalization, whether sustainability is top of mind moving through the pandemic, and the evolving demands of travellers in this new age of travel. Looking back on the pandemic, Menon said, “What was initially seen as a challenge actually turned out to be an opportunity. I do not think any of us faced a challenge of this kind, but there was a realisation that you are not alone and everybody is facing the same problem. The last two years have given us the opportunity to reset. ”
He said that Thomas Cook (India) had resized out of necessity, carried out back-end integration, and upgraded its technology to create a more customer-centric focus. “This journey we are taking at Thomas Cook is moving from telling the customer what he or she should do on their holiday to the point where the customer chooses how he or she wants to go on holiday and how they want to interact with us,” he added. “The experience and access to information should be the same no matter how a customer comes to us.”
