“Even as travel becomes routine again we expect many companies will be looking to save on travel costs.” “Covid-19 has changed the way companies think about business travel,” a spokesperson for Kayak told Skift. They’ll actually often be able to find a cheaper deal, but be oblivious to what goes on behind that corporate fare, such as extra date flexibility, luggage allowance, traveler tracking and reconciliation.Ĭorporate travel booking tools are evolving to become simpler to use, but never seem to catch up with the user friendliness, speed or familiarity offered by metasearch sites Ask a company travel manager for their biggest gripe, and they’ll likely say it’s employees who waste time trying to find a cheaper ticket, or room night, rather than go with the price showing up on the company’s online booking tool. Traditionally, metasearch and company travel don’t mix. They send the search query to several search engines, such as an online agent like Expedia, and can trawl directly through an airline or hotel’s website, before compiling the results into an easily comparable list.

Metasearch websites, or aggregators, take the heavy lifting out of scanning through dozens of travel websites. Kayak, meanwhile, signalled its intent last year to launch Kayak for Business, and told Skift it will launch the new platform this fall. More than 1,000 small and medium-sized companies are already up and running. Russia’s and Kayak (owned by Bookings Holdings) are now making inroads into the corporate travel sector.Īviasales launched Aviasales for Business in April this year, since developing the platform in September 2019. Join Us For Our Skift Global Forum Online Conference September 21-23 And it’s here where two metasearch websites spot an opportunity. For smaller companies, using a corporate travel agency might not be cost effective if there’s not much travel. With a dedicated company booking channel, one of the biggest advantages is that the data’s all in one place. Fast forward, they may also be regretting not having access to a simple way to claw back airline refunds, instead having to approach airlines individually. An early lesson to be learned from the pandemic was that, actually, a company’s travel operation is important, regardless of that organization’s size.ĭuring the evacuations and repatriations earlier this year, many companies without a program would have quickly realized they didn’t know exactly where employees were as countries shut their borders.

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