The Business Travel Magazine - May/June 2021

Page 28

TRAVELLER SAFETY TECHNOLOGY

Digital

REVOLUTION Technological transformation in business travel is happening so fast it’s hard to keep up, says Bev Fearis

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They had realised that, as we emerged from the crisis, we would all be relying on touchless, virtual, and cloud-based technology, to keep our travellers safe and restore their confidence. “As we return to business travel, travel technology will be more critical than ever before to ensure a seamless and safe experience for the traveller and the proper duty of care that travel managers and their businesses require,” says Simone Buckley, VP Marketing TripActions. “This includes features that offer real-time visibility, such as live reporting, traveller maps, Covid-19 dashboards, as well as integrated health and safety tools, such as digital health passports and trip change notifications.”

Full throttle

Of course, many of these solutions would have eventually come into being even without Covid, but nowhere near as quickly. “Very few of these trends are new, but they are moving fast and are significantly impacted by the new needs of our companies, colleagues and travellers as we emerge, as a diverse geographically spread workforce, into a post-Covid hybrid world,” says Chris Crowley, who was recently appointed Senior Vice President Of Global Sales at Duetto. Rudy Daniello, Amadeus EVP Corporations, agrees: “Most companies had these transformation tasks on their to-do list anyway, but the pandemic has shone a very bright light on some of the shortcomings

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n the first six months of the pandemic, while we were all busy baking banana bread, clapping for the NHS and buying puppies, a technological transformation was taking place – a transformation so significant that, according to a report from Amadeus and the Business Travel Association, it would usually have taken place over two to three years. Even in the early days of the Covid outbreak, before many of us had understood its significance and the enormous impact it would have on our daily lives, somewhere in the world there were teams of clever travel techies tapping, clicking and swiping at their screens to develop digital solutions we didn’t even know we needed.


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