Business Travel Show 2022: The CTM Wrap-up

The event brings together the business travel community for two packed days of keynote sessions, buyer workshops, networking, evening events and pre-booked meetings for the world’s top travel buyers to understand the current market and talk to suppliers from all over the world face-to-face.

The Corporate Travel Management (CTM) team were proud to show off their new proprietary traveller relationship management system, CTM Advisor in the UK and Europe and a range of new enhancements in our proprietary online booking tool, Lightning, CTM Mobile and CTM Portal.

Empowering Service Intelligence

CTM’s 2022 Global Customer Survey found the priority focus for global travel programmes (operating in three or more continents) in 2022/23 would be ‘customer service’.

As such, we fast-tracked the roll-out of our proprietary traveller CRM, which provides travel consultants with a combination of real-time traveller insights and historical booking behaviour alongside company policies and preferences to deliver unmatched personalised service across multiple regions, using one proprietary system rather than multiple third-party tools.

Giving our agents visibility of where a traveller is and what disruption they’re facing, proactively rebooking tickets, contacting travellers and providing only the options that are right for both the traveller and company, giving CTM’s customers greater care and attention.

 

Make Greener Choices

The CTM team showcased a range of enhancements to its proprietary online booking tool, Lightning, CTM Mobile and CTM Portal helping travellers make more sustainable travel choices.

Our new carbon transfers feature allows employees to transfer carbon budgets should employees find they need to travel less – or more – during a given period, allowing them to transfer carbon budgets between each other to efficiently manage and meet the business’ sustainability targets.

Following our addition to the Lightning web app at Business Travel Show Europe 2021, Carbon Budgets has now been added to the Lightning mobile app and CTM Portal, giving customers a 360-degree view of their carbon budget with updates appearing in real-time as new flights, hotels or train bookings are added to their trip baskets.

Carbon Budgets allow users to set, monitor, manage and meet travel sustainability goals:

• Users can assign department, group and individual CO₂ budgets by year, quarter or month to encourage sustainable travel choices.
• Budgets are displayed at the point of search directly above the user’s search results and dynamically update in real-time based on travel choices.
• Users can easily compare the CO₂ impact of switching travel modes with air vs rail and price with the simultaneous search option.

We also enhanced our Carbon Offsetting tool, which allows users to support multiple projects and split allowances accordingly. Travellers (in addition to organisations) have now been given the opportunity to choose which projects are supported.

These enhancements are in addition to Lightning’s Green Choice function, which was integrated into Lightning in 2021 allowing bookers to identify the most sustainable travel option in an instant with the ‘green choice’ flagged in their search results.

 

Business travel is back, are you keeping up?

Our stand was buzzing from activity from beginning to end and it was a joy to catch up with so many people over coffee and cocktails. A huge thank you to everyone who joined us for a chat.

The CTM team had a hugely successful event and it felt great to have so many in-depth discussions with travel buyers. We got to find out how their programme had changed, how their goals had shifted and also met many new travel managers who recently found themselves responsible for procuring and managing travel after reshuffles in their organisations. Getting to know them and their challenges face-to-face reminded us all why travel is so important.