A new report from Amadeus reveals that TMCs in Africa are super-keen to invest in technology.
The report is the first in a series that will focus on technological investment of different elements of the travel industry, based on responses from senior travel agency leaders around the world. To qualify as a respondent, the company had to be one which assisted businesses in organising travel arrangements for the business’s employees. This could include transport, accommodation, local services and helpline support. The report does not include online travel agencies.
The majority of these travel booking companies showed an eagerness to invest in technology. Amadeus found that 91% of agencies were planning at least moderate investment in their business over the coming year. Africa emerged as the region with the most extreme focus on investment, with 62% of respondents on the continent saying they plan to invest ‘aggressively’.
69% of corporate travel agencies globally planned to invest more in technology in 2024 than in 2023. On average, agencies were investing 13% more in this year.
According to Paul de Villiers, SVP of Global Business Accounts for Amadeus, agencies specialising in corporate travel were looking for a range of new capabilities from these technology investments.
“They want more sophisticated solutions and a wider range of products, such as access to meeting facilities and being able to build end-to-end trips,” he said.
He said corporate travel agencies had ambitions to serve the ‘blended’ travel market, which combined corporate and leisure travel. In support of this, when asked in the survey which capabilities they were looking for to drive new revenue, 62% of agencies said they were looking for the capability to manage blended travel trips. The same number of agencies also said they were looking for a capability that allowed them to book additional products.
Corporate travel agencies indicated that business travellers’ expectations of agents were shifting and that travellers expected more personalisation, which would mean the creation of bespoke itineraries.
A third of the business travel agencies surveyed said they were seeking ways to implement new capabilities such as API aggregation, low-cost carrier searches and booking solutions in the short term. Conversational searching and robotics for back-office efficiency emerged as the highest priorities for long-term investment.
47% of these agencies had already implemented conversational search; 43% said they had a low-cost search and booking solution in place; 44% had implemented NDC. 90% of the travel businesses said they would implement all of this technology at some point in the future.
