There is no shortage of digital channels these days for people to engage with each other, either at work or at play. But travel managers (and their appointed travel management companies) can still struggle to find the most effective medium to communicate with travellers and travel arrangers.

¡°The technology that travel teams have to engage with their travellers hasn¡¯t really evolved at the same rate as technologies like Slack,¡± says Adam Kerr, founder and CEO of Tripism. ¡°One of our customers said to me: ¡®We have two forms of traveller engagement. One is to send an email to 60,000 employees. The other is to stick a PDF on the intranet where no one will read it¡¯.¡±

Travel managers have to be much more ambitious now, according to Mark Cuschieri, global head of travel at UBS. ¡°Some travellers are working from home, some in the office,¡± he says. ¡°How do you get your message across? It¡¯s not just through one communication asset. If you want to extend your reach, you are going to have to use multiple channels.¡±?

Email alone will not cut it, Cuschieri insists. ¡°We call an email a tweemail here,¡± he says.

Kerr¡¯s customer was presumably exaggerating for effect when saying the only choices were email or intranet. Other options have been around for a while. One example is contextual mobile messages, which are sent to travellers at the relevant point of their journey ¨C a reminder when their flight lands to take the train rather than a taxi from the airport to the city centre, for example.

¡°If you time them well, you¡¯re not only going to make the traveller happy, you¡¯re going to save money,¡± says Andy Menkes, founder and CEO of Partnership Travel Consulting.

Contextual messaging is a regular feature of mobile apps provided by TMCs and others. However, these are travel-specific channels, not the more general communication platforms travellers use every day. Some people think that needs to change.

¡°We have learned that travellers want travel technology to be where they are at their desk or on the move,¡± says Katie Skitterall, group commercial director for ATPI, the multinational TMC. ¡°The majority of our clients are in Microsoft Teams ¨C or Slack if you¡¯re in the US ¨C and WhatsApp in their personal lives.

¡°Often you¡¯ve got to go outside where you are in order to book or communicate with your TMC. Other TMCs are trying to do it with their own chat function, which is a bit of a turn-off because you don¡¯t want to go somewhere else; you want to be where you are all the time.¡±

It is a philosophy that extends beyond communication. Concluding that many enterprises are, in Skitterall¡¯s words, ¡°Microsoft houses¡±, ATPI is working on a strategy to integrate much of its customer technology into Microsoft, starting with profile, itinerary, invoice and approval tools pilots over the next few months.

ATPI¡¯s presence on Teams is already up and running. One customer using the channel alongside email is the digital sports content and media group DAZN. ¡°Teams is a chat function,¡± says global travel manager Kim Trenter. ¡°It¡¯s good for a quick question because people are not in the office that much any more when they might ask you over the water cooler.¡±

Teams is an enterprise comms platform but ATPI believes in engaging through personal channels too, especially for employees planning their travel outside normal working hours. Accordingly, ATPI now communicates via WhatsApp too.

Trenter loves the idea. ¡°In some markets like India and Brazil we already communicate within the business via WhatsApp,¡± she says. ¡°I know a couple of companies which have rolled out WhatsApp with their TMC and found that really successful, so hopefully we¡¯ll be doing that over the next quarter. ATPI already has the ability to do it. It¡¯s just a question of making sure our security team can approve it.¡±

Engagement is not just about chat, however. It also includes providing knowledge resources such as travel policy, insurance details and instructions for new employees. DAZN houses all this information on Microsoft collaborative platform SharePoint, while other companies often do so on their general employee intranets.

Tripism¡¯s Kerr argues all such platforms are too static and inadequately configured to the particular needs of traveller engagement. At the same time, he says, engagement has become a more complex, specialised task for two reasons. The first is that there is a lot more to engage about than a decade ago: sustainability and wellbeing, for example. The second is that companies typically have far more travel partners.

Kerr also observes the trend for businesses to move to specialist platforms for other enterprise functions, such as Workday for HR and Coupa for procurement. He launched Tripism to fill the gap he describes. ¡°We believe traveller information and engagement has become so sophisticated and complex that you now need a specialist platform,¡± he says.

Tripism clients include Barclays, Nike, Oracle and, interestingly, Microsoft, perhaps reinforcing the point that traveller engagement demands more than a combination of Teams, email and SharePoint. The Tripism offering includes customised content such as benefits and promotions summaries for the client¡¯s preferred suppliers, plus destination and travel programme information; and feedback from travellers, including hotel reviews and travel tips, as well as surveys of their trip experience.

¡°Every time someone returns from travel they receive a message asking them to rate each part of their journey,¡± says Cuschieri, a Tripism customer. ¡°If there was an issue, an automated email goes to the respective regional head and we act upon it within 24 hours. That¡¯s what our travellers like: they know that they will always get a response. We are able to measure the performance of each aspect of the journey and we know where we maybe have pain points.¡±

Given that UBS runs Tripism alongside other information sources including its agency mobile app, an obvious risk with deploying multiple platforms, including one exclusively for traveller engagement, is fragmentation and inconsistency. Therefore, Cuschieri warns, a key requirement for a successful omnichannel strategy is good interconnectivity.

¡°From any asset you can go to somewhere else,¡± he says. ¡°If you are on Tripism and need to know what our travel policy is, you can go to our travel policy. Our online booking tool also has the ability to ping back to all our portals. We replicate our messaging or we push people between the platforms, so wherever you are you can always get to where you need, whether it¡¯s to make a booking, look at our hotel programme, make a review or chat to an agent. This does make it much more complicated but there¡¯s no one platform we believe will suffice.¡±

Another crucial multi-platform consideration is security. ¡°Any time you are pushing personally identifiable information or company proprietary information, you probably have to get approval from corporate security,¡± says Menkes. ¡°The minute a PNR is up in the ether it¡¯s fair game unless it is protected.¡±

Skitterall says adequate precautions can be taken. For example, ATPI would not accept photos from travellers of their passports on WhatsApp. Instead, it would send a link to a secure website where the photo could be uploaded.

But perhaps the most important advice of all, appropriately enough for an engagement strategy, is to engage with stakeholders about that strategy before embarking on it. ¡°It sounds really basic but I just ask travel bookers and key travellers what form of communication they want instead of giving them what I think they want,¡± says Trenter.

For now the answer to Trenter¡¯s question is Teams and WhatsApp, but what next? TikTok and Snapchat anyone? ¡°Why not?¡± says Skitterall, adding that it is only a matter of time before the generation which uses such platforms become business travellers themselves. ¡°All these up-and-coming social platforms ¨C we¡¯re going to need to be there,¡± she says.