Sounding Off: Is tech innovation enough to fix business travel?

Each Friday, PhocusWire dissects and debates an industry trend or new development covered on our site that week.

"Travel planning is broken" - a phrase coined by every new business pitching at an industry startup competition between 2009 and, well, what is likely to be forever.

We exaggerate somewhat for editorial impact but many industry watchers will recognize the assertion that everything in the process of search and booking in travel is somehow failing has, sadly, become rather overused.

This has been mostly put forward in the context of leisure travel, perhaps because it's a good starting point for startups to get the attention of investors and their peers in the sector.

In recent years, however, it has found itself increasingly part of the corporate travel startup vernacular, trotted out by companies trying to disrupt a sector that is arguably beholden to rules and processes more than any other (apart from, say, aviation safety).

The premise is that business travelers want to shop, buy and experience their trips on behalf of their employers in the same way that they do their leisure travel.

Perhaps they do - but does this mean that the long-standing methods of doing so are "broken" to the degree that they needed fixing?

This is where the rhetoric rubs fairly awkwardly against the reality.

Better technology and products are certainly needed, not least if the user experience is going to be improved.

But the fundamental aspects of corporate travel - management, search and the booking of employee trips - are not changing to the extent to what is being claimed.

Policies are evolving, for sure, yet this is a cultural and generational shift, rather than an overhaul of the model entirely.

So what is igniting the move by investors to flood the market with startup capital into new businesses such as TravelPerk and others?

It is far less about the technology - as noted above - and more to do with anticipating how the existing players (the travel management giants) are, in the eyes of investors, slow to evolve. And so they hedge their bets.

The market will evolve... it has to, based on the forces within it asking for the experience of corporate travel to change.

But this isn't actually an innovation issue - it's simply a process by which the incumbents will get up to speed, driven now by startups and investors being smart about how they do business and have a customer-first strategy and product.