At 8th edition of Travel M!CE & Corporate Show in Chennai, corporates & professionals from airline, travel & hospitality industries deep dived into high-octane discussions.
Lipla Negi
With more than 1,000 fruitful business meetings, the 8th edition of Travel M!CE and Corporate Show concluded successfully in Chennai. Over a span of two days, the select gathering welcomed corporates and professionals from airline and hospitality sectors as well as international tourism boards. Over the years, the platform has earned a reputation for bringing decision makers and stakeholders under one roof for an insightful interaction and deliberation powered by meetings that strictly deliver business.
Featuring Suraj Nair, Founder, Travel Spends; Ashish Arpit, CEO, itilite; Gaurav Nagwekar, Head, Corporate Travel, Reliance Industries; Jyoti Varma, renowned industry expert and consultant, Travel M!CE and Corporate Show and an audience of around 200-strong professionals and decision makers from corporate airline, travel and hospitality industries, the panel discussion witnessed highly animated and forward-looking conversation around—the right fit TMC—a myth or reality? The subject touched upon the right pain points and attracted varied yet insightful perspectives from the panellists and audience alike.
New challenges
Riding on the rising demand for in-person events, M!CE makes a big comeback on corporate calendars. With an unspent budget and an appetite to connect and converse, the corporates are back with incentive travel and big M!CE groups. Reflecting upon the spectacular recovery of M!CE, Suraj Nair, Founder, Travel Spends said, “Bouncing back from COVID, the business started zooming up. Hotel and airline costs went over the roof and many of us, heading travel vertical at corporates, are still grappling with these things.” While M!CE is back with a bang, the price rise has got many corporates staring at the pertinent question of how do we control costs? Addressing the question, Nair believed, “The balance of demand and supply over the period of time is going to bring some sanity to the market.”
Highlighting two major challenges for TMCs, Gaurav Nagwekar, Head, Corporate Travel, Reliance Industries explained, “Talent is an area where TMCs are losing their pulse.” He underlined how volumes have grown up, not just in India but also globally and suggested that the entire travel fraternity needs to go back and reengineer how best they can retain the talent. Automation and digital platforms make up for the second major challenge. He stated, “I do not think any one of these travel companies are even close to what corporates are expecting. Most of the TMCs are only talking about profiling and online booking tools whereas, corporates are talking about digital platforms, mobile adoption.”
Collaboration
While discussing the expectations of corporates and deliverables by TMCs, both the speakers unanimously agreed on working towards a more integrated platform to support each other and reduce the gap between expectations and reality. Delving into the complexity of processes, Ashish Arpit, CEO, itilite explained, “Booking is one aspect of digitization programme. Before booking there are a series of workflows, which need to be automated and there comes the complexity. For instance, the kind of approval rules which one company will have, will be very different from what other companies will have. Now the way any tech company will build its product is to ensure that they built their product in such a way that it caters to a lot of companies because they should not be investing resources in mapping the workflow requirement of each and every company. Hence, our focus has been to not only automate the booking process but also accommodate the company policies and rules around it.”
He further stressed upon the need to take into consideration the behavioral aspect of the traveller as well as approvals to unlock the true value of data. “When it comes to the post-booking phase, it is important to see what aspects of your travel management booking you can bring online because then you can play back the data, which corporates need. For instance, if your approvals are happening online how can you get data on how many exceptional approvals are happening. If I can automate the entire workflow, I can get a lot more insight into the behavioural aspect of the traveller as well as approvals,” he reckoned.
Plug-in & play
Underlining how one supplier cannot bring everything under the roof, Nair asked the corporate representatives if they are ready to create the framework wherein, they allow the people to plug and integrate into their system. Agreeing with the idea, Nagwekar said, “Building the framework is very critical for any corporate in this era. It will give me control to renegotiate and understand how the market is flowing in each aspect. But it is equally important to understand that it is not just air and hotel rather, it is air, hotel, visa, insurance, forex, among others, so that as a Travel Manager we are able to get a holistic approach. It can only happen if we build our own framework and jointly work with digital travel companies.”
The discussion around the need of one framework, brought into spotlight the significance of the supplier ecosystem. Explained Arpit, “We are also dependent on our supplier ecosystem. For instance, if we talk about ground transport, there is some investment that has to be made from ground transport vendors as well if we want to bring them online. What we can do from our side is to develop a plug-in and play model that in areas where we cannot go very deep, we have our own supplier ecosystem who we plug in so that corporates just have to deal with one player and that player in return is talking to an ecosystem of suppliers.” There was a clear consensus on the fact that the only way forward is to digitize your travel. Nagwekar stated, “We are talking about ChatGPT. With blockchain technology, it is going to change the entire travel programme and how the industry works. We need to come together jointly and work on it.”
RFPs not hot anymore
While the panellists and audience agreed that it is never one size fits all scenario, they differed on the subject whether RFPs of hotels are required or not? “Gone are the days when RFPs are used to be a hot cake,” stated Nair. In a major departure from 2019, most of the corporates accepted that they do not ask for RFPs anymore. Bouncing back the question to the audience, Nagwekar asked, “Do we need RFPs?”
Taking the question, Leena Andrews, Group Travel Manager, APAC said, “We need to have a preferred list in our system. We must make sure that people are staying in our preferred hotels. It helps track them better and ensure they are safe and healthy.” To this Nair added, “While you have no control over price hike, the process helps you buy better and you still enjoy early check-in, late check-out and penalty wave-off.”
Varma summed up, “The concept of lower price wins needs to change. It is not the right thing to push down the supplier on pricing. Let the buyer also decide what this service costs the vendor. Corporates need to see—will that service be valuable to them. Right now, we do not think as insiders but outsiders, which has to change.”
