Collaborative travel: business tourism
Posted on February 22, 2012
Posted by Stuart Brocklehurst (Group Communications Director, Amadeus IT Group)
When I reflect on my most notable travel experiences, many of them occurred on business trips, not vacations.
Attending a majlis in Kuwait and a tribal durbar in Ghana were moments that probably would not have come my way as a tourist: visiting a country with purpose, to meet and discuss with the people who live there, can provide a deeper engagement than a passing stay in a hotel or resort.
The research carried out recently for Amadeus suggested that appropriate combinations of business and pleasure may play a growing role in travel. Employers are concerned to ensure the wellbeing of their staff, travel providers are keen to ensure repeat business – and business travellers want new experiences whilst they are away.
Our survey showed that 71% of business travellers – compared with only 60% of tourists – want a complete contrast to their daily life whilst they’re away. This may suggest a trend for hotels which are true to their surroundings with concierge support to enable easy evening encounters with local life. It’s suggested that hotels may become community hubs – with local artists and artisans demonstrating their skills.
All this will have to develop in parallel with tighter travel management, of course. No organisation wants to see spurious meetings in exotic locations, and business tourism will only grow if employers can be confident their tracking data demonstrates it’s not being abused. As ever, the growing availability of detailed data and the ability to process that into information is key.
This post is the last in this series looking at our report on collaborative travel. If this subject is of interest, please do look at the full report, and why not sign up for regular updates from this blog? We publish regularly on both the present and the future of travel technology – so do keep in touch and check back regularly.
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Collaborative travel: intelligent recommendation
Posted on February 21, 2012
Posted by Stuart Brocklehurst (Group Communications Director, Amadeus IT Group) How much research did you do before your last trip away? Recent research for Amadeus found that the answer to that question is closely linked to your generation. If you’re over 50, or between 30 and 49, you’re most likely to have used a single [...]
Collaborative travel: payment with memory
Posted on February 16, 2012
How can the travel industry build the store of knowledge necessary to deliver the next generation experience? Individual hotel chains or airlines know a lot about their frequent customers, but their view of the traveller more generally is often restricted to those parts of the trip they have provided. A hotel might provide a guest with a soft mattress based on a request during a previous stay, but not know he complained of a backache during the flight in.
Collaborative travel: next generation experience
Posted on February 15, 2012
How do you decide where to spend your time off? Do you go for a new experience, somewhere you’ve never been before, or something reassuringly familiar? A place recommended by a friend, or something you saw on a TV travel show?
Collaborative travel: travel wellbeing
Posted on February 14, 2012
Posted by Stuart Brocklehurst (Group Communications Director, Amadeus IT Group) As a native English speaker (though my American colleagues may disagree with that) I’m always amused by the overhead messages on French motorways instructing “restez zen!” – keep calm! Travel is one of the most stress-inducing experiences we voluntarily subject ourselves to – will I [...]
Collaborative travel: automatic transit
Posted on February 13, 2012
Posted by Stuart Brocklehurst (Group Communications Director, Amadeus IT Group) My dog and I often cross borders together. That’s not Border Collies, but actual national boundaries with passport checks. When we approach immigration, it’s interesting to see how each of us interacts with technology. We both have our identity confirmed by chips, but whereas I [...]
Why the next ten years looks set to be the decade of rail
Posted on February 10, 2012
We’ve launched a major new whitepaper entitled Back on Track with the aim of stimulating debate around the theme of how outsourcing can help drive modernisation in the rail industry.
From eTourism to door-to-door: why the future of travel looks bright to Amadeus
Posted on February 8, 2012
Recently, I was privileged to participate in the ENTER conference organised by the International Federation of Information Technology for Travel and Tourism (IFITT) in Helsingborg, Sweden.
This year’s conference focused on eTourism Present and Future, Services and Applications, and more specifically looked at the role both demand and supply play in this quite clearly hectic arena.
The sky is the limit – retailing and the future of ancillaries
Posted on February 3, 2012
Posted by Marian Hens (Global Communications Manager, Amadeus IT Group) “On ancillaries, the sky really is the limit”. This was the opening salvo of the New Airline Commercial Models, Retailing and Merchandising 2012 conference, which gathered industry experts in London last week to explore new ways of distributing airfares and inventory. As we heard at the [...]
Update 5: Statement from Amadeus IT Group
Posted on January 31, 2012
Yesterday and today we have been keeping you updated regarding the development of a systems incident. This has been resolved, as we communicated earlier today.
Minimising such incidents and their impact on our customers is very important to Amadeus. During the incident, our priority was to return to normal service as quickly as possible; once it closed we focused on identifying the cause and analysing actions we could take to avoid reoccurrence. The cause of the problem appears to be a network component. We are continuing to investigate this in detail.
Once again, we regret the inconvenience this incident may have caused.
