Moving beyond passenger name records in corporate travel

The corporate travel technology landscape could change radically if it moved to a more "plug and play" environment.

While processes currently largely revolve around legacy technology some experts say a more open, micro-services environment would lead to greater innovation.

Speaking at the Business Travel Show early this month, travel buyers and managers as well as technology suppliers defined what a micro-services strategy might look like.

Katharina Navarro, global category manager, travel and meetings, Capgemini, described it as a plug and play environment enabling buyers to bring different content and technology providers together in an environment and add a user interface for travelers.

“You can manage in the background all the complexity of the changing environment - GDS, NDC etc, put your policy on top and really put preferences and best choices in front of the traveler so he has trust in the system that he gets the best content and knows what to book without needing to check outside.”

She added that when new content or functionality is developed it can be added “without the traveler ever seeing you are changing the pipelines.”

Johnny Thorsen, whose has held many roles corporate travel and mostly recently joined corporate travel startup, Spotnana, as head of partnerships and strategy, has been talking about the need for a micro-services environment since 2017.

“If you go down that path [of micro-services] and start thinking about what that can mean then we have a lot of products in the travel industry that will potentially become obsolete, the biggest one is the PNR

"All products in this industry are built on non digital capability with 200 lines of free text - imagine if that free text becomes digital - to me that’s what micro-services is, a move away from analogue to make digital automation and integrated service delivery possible for a buyer.”

Thorsen went further on how the airline Passenger Name Record (PNR), and unstructured data generally, is hampering development.

“The entire ecosystem is built around a static environment called the PNR - two years ago at an IATA conference both United and Lufthansa publicly stated they had tested how many internal systems touched the PNR in the lifetime from booking to boarding - 70. So, they have 70 systems they maintain to keep people traveling.”

He described the whole process, once corporate travel systems and third party technologies are layered on top, as “horribly inefficient” and said travel buyers and TMCs had decisions to make about moving to a “new world.”

Many of the same issues were raised by former British Airways boss Alex Cruz during a recent CAPA Live event where he said "thousands of software plasters, band-aids" had been added to airline systems over time making them increasingly unreliable and prone to security breaches.

Some travel management specialists are already finding ways around the current process.

Data integration

Manoj Ganapathy, CEO of Salestrip, said that while its booking engine is built on existing infrastructure it has its own record of what the traveler does.

“We simply map our own reference to the PNR reference because it’s too unstructured and we couldn’t do anything.”

Ganapathy believes travel should not be a silo but integrated into enterprise systems used within companies.

“There are different business functions in a company. The majority of us are going into a specific portal that does travel and travel alone. There is reams of information already in your system - Oracle, Salesforce, SAP - and my belief is that there should be a conglomeration of all this data

"I’m trying to take it back into company information, your financial data, into your sales data, your marketing data, you know who your customer is and why you’re traveling. Why shouldn’t travel exist as one component of the enterprise system, why does it have to be separate?”

The panel also touched on whether data privacy concerns might accelerate a move to micro-services.

Thorsen says: “This is one of the biggest opportunity areas for the industry. Today we have model where profile data gets pushed to a lot of legacy systems because that’s how we built it. If you take a step back, a corporate buyer will say very soon my HR data will never leave the house.

"You will have token access, in other words a digital key that can be stored in other systems so you have no privacy issues because the digital key is the only thing which lives outside the corporate HR world and the enterprise IT can allow services to be activated without even looking at data privacy concerns.”

He predicted this development could be three to five years away with some companies already doing it.

The full session is available to view below.

Highlights: