Return to business travel brings new challenges and opportunities in its wake

Tripism experiences rapid growth as return to travel brings challenges and opportunities for the corporate travel industry

Tripism, the business travel planning and engagement platform, is reporting exponential user growth as corporate travel teams scramble to deal with the rapid return to business travel in 2022.

With a growing portfolio of major corporate clients, Tripism is now seeing activity levels on its platform approximately 250% higher than their highest peak before the pandemic – and a roughly 500% increase since January 2022. Over 17,000 new users are being added to the platform each month.

Global Business Travel Association (GBTA) data from April highlights a “double-digit surge” in companies allowing ‘non-essential’ business travel since February. Tripism’s growth reflects how corporate travel teams are experiencing increasingly complex demands for detailed trip planning information. The surge in demand – and the rate of change of this information as a result of the return to travel – is proving to be beyond the capabilities many organisations’ legacy travel intranets.

Post-pandemic shortages of staff – from too few pilots to insufficient numbers of agents at travel management companies (source: The Company Dime) – are making travel planning and booking difficult. For example, aviation data provider Cirium highlights that British Airways alone cancelled more than 1,200 flights in the first three months of this year.

Commenting on the struggle in corporate travel at the start of 2022, Tripism CEO Adam Kerr said: “The sudden increase in demand for corporate travel this year is presenting serious challenges across the industry. As well as the well-publicised shortages of flights and hotel capacity travel teams are having to quickly adapt to this challenging environment; communication to travellers is paramount. On top of this they need to inform travellers about new supplier partners they have introduced and an increased focus on sustainability. Travel is back, but not as we knew it.

“The importance of traveller well-being was increasing pre-pandemic but is now a travel-critical decision point. Few organisations have the tools or technology to stay on top of all the data points their employees expect.

“People want more detailed information, and they insist on having up to date information. This is leading to further outsourcing of the corporate travel tools, especially the in-house travel intranet, which is creating opportunities for Tripism and for travel management companies that are able to service this demand.”