NB: This series is a guest post by Mark Tilden, co-founder of Conducive Technology and a creator of FlightStats.
It seems that every other press release these days is about another corporate travel agency announcing a mobile itinerary strategy.
Agencies are under enormous competitive pressure to "check the box" of a mobile itinerary strategy as their customers increasingly expect mobile capability.
While even the simplest mobile itinerary viewer offers some benefit to the traveler, many of these partnerships appear to be more of a tactical reaction by the agency to the competitive pressure instead of an integrated customer service strategy that includes a smart mobile offering.
In some cases, re-branded or co-branded consumer itinerary applications may actually do more harm than good for the agency.
Many applications rely on confirmation email parsing that makes itinerary changes difficult to handle. Most don't include any significant reporting capability, and may even encourage out-of-policy booking behavior.
In addition, these applications usually don't do much to improve customer service and offer no opportunity to the agency for incremental revenue.
However, if they are part of an integrated customer service strategy, smart phones and mobile itinerary applications represent a real strategic opportunity to dramatically increase the agency's relevance and value on the day of travel as well as before and after the trip.
An integrated strategy can help minimize leakage, promote policy compliance, encourage productive engagement with the traveler, and provide full global visibility and reporting to the agency and corporate travel manager both during and after the trip.
A strategy that addresses these key components would be a success by any measure.
However, smart mobile devices also offer an opportunity to deliver new high-value services on the day of travel that create new revenue opportunities for the agency.
So what does an integrated customer service strategy that incorporates mobile look like?
Of course, there will be differences between agencies and corporate customers, but let's consider a few common elements of such a strategy.
Part One - Direct itinerary capture and processing
Integrating a mobile device into the overall customer service strategy begins with reliable and efficient itinerary capture and change management.
While constructing the initial itinerary from parsed emails is simple (though somewhat unreliable) and doesn't require virtually any IT investment, changes to the itinerary are difficult to manage—even when they are made by the agency.
All-too-common travel disruptions can often mean that the agency, the mobile device, and the actual travel itinerary are out of sync. In addition, a static itinerary viewer does nothing to help the traveler deal with these disruptions.
Consumer itinerary applications with email parsing often strip all agency branding from the itineraries as well, effectively cutting the agency out of the traveler's day-of-travel experience.
Look for a solution that includes a direct connection to the agency's mid-office or QC systems or to the GDS used by the agency.
An ideal system also makes it very easy for the traveler to report a change to the agency and have their agency itinerary updated outside of these systems.
Imagine a traveler being able to select an itinerary segment on the mobile itinerary application and generate a message directly within their itinerary application that informs their agency that the airline has re-protected the traveler on the selected segment.
The application picks up most of the relevant details including the date, origin and destination from the itinerary and all the traveler has to do is report the new flight number.
The system can then update the itinerary within the monitoring system to reflect the changes so that all monitoring and messaging is on the updated itinerary.
The agency remains in the loop and relevant, even when changes are made outside of the agency's control.
In addition, security systems for traveler tracking can also receive the updates from the itinerary monitoring system so that travelers don't fall "off the radar" when trip disruptions occur.
NB: This series is a guest post by Mark Tilden, co-founder of Conducive Technology and a creator of FlightStats.