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Egencia Platform & Product Update for Customer Experience in 2021

Egencia expands platform capabilities and enhances customer experience

5 min
Posted: 11 May 2021
Woman with laptop

Although business travel has been disrupted over the past year, Egencia hasn’t stopped listening to customer feedback and focusing on making the experience of booking and managing business travel better.

John Sturino, Egencia’s recently appointed Vice President of Travel Product, expands on his vision for the Egencia platform,

"Our product in development during 2020 helped companies and business travellers manage a changing environment. Innovations like Travel Advisor and Egencia Savings Finder for Hotel helped them meet their duty of care requirements and manage their budgets during a tough year.

In 2021, we’re continuing to help businesses adapt to an evolving travel situation by focusing on data products including analytics to help manage everything from cost to environmental impact, intelligent tools for travellers and travel arrangers to make booking the right trip even easier, and AI to put the power of Egencia's experience and expertise in the travellers' hands. It’s like having a travel consultant in your pocket.”

Through continuous innovation, Egencia consistently powers our customers’ businesses’ growth, strengthens their business success with in-person connections, broadens horizons and bridges divides— all through travel and underpinned by the powerful Egencia suite of tools to book and manage travel.

Latest product enhancements deliver even more self-service, traveller support and data that underpins effective travel risk management

In the first quarter of 2021, Egencia customers benefited from several product enhancements including:

  • Verified hotel reviews customers can trust. Egencia customers can access verified hotel reviews from other travellers.
  • Expanded geographic coverage for rail. Travellers and travel arrangers in Norway and Spain have online rail booking capability, including a suite of tools to help support their decisions about travel, with proactive travel alerts and health and hygiene information. Travel Managers also benefit from reduced offline cost and increased visibility with travel risk management data.
  • Fast, on-demand response to help travellers when they need it. Egencia Chat with virtual agent support and live chats with travel consultants, is available in 19 countries with local language supported, such as Chinese, French and German. Travellers and travel arrangers have access to support on-demand, speeding resolutions through self-service capabilities and without having to pick up the phone.
  • Trip approval on-the-go with Egencia Chat. Approvers can access approval via Chat to approve, request more information or to deny bookings for their travellers.
  • Manage cost, changes and cancelations, easily. Increased self-service to manage air and hotel cancelations in order to respond to an ever-evolving travel landscape. In addition, travellers will benefit from faster notification of airline scheduled changes.
  • Save on out-of-pocket expenses with virtual card. Travellers can pay for hotel incidentals that reduces the risk of fraud with a one-time card number and manual expense claims.
  • Enabling greener travel choices. Building on current features such as Co2 information at the time of booking and reporting in Egencia Analytics Studio, Egencia released a new filter that allows travellers and travel arrangers to book hotels with electric car charging stations - aiding clients’ corporate responsibility and sustainability initiatives. Additionally, the team enhanced an existing search filter for ‘green car’ options for travellers and arrangers booking a car rental.
  • Enhancements to Travel Advisor and delivering even more traveller relevance. Increased targeting of contextually relevant advisories to travellers, new in-transit advisories for connections and design changes that further increase the information available to make informed booking and travel decisions.

The product team is also currently incorporating customer feedback from several pilots, with broader customer activations planned in Q2 and Q3 across Egencia’s platform.

"Without a doubt for bioMérieux, online rail booking has been the most awaited and desired launch on the Egencia platform for our travellers in Spain. From now on, the management of train reservations will be more agile and efficient - increasing self-service for our travellers, as well as ensuring greater and better internal control with trip approval.”

Belén Martínez, bioMérieux España, s.a. | General Services and Facility Lead

Fast access to data, empowered users and intelligent product experiences of the future

Over the last twelve months we’ve listened to what customers need and have already started work on several releases coming soon around the world. The Egencia product team is laser focused on delivering even faster access to data and actionable insights, automation that empowers users with even more self-service tools at their fingertips. This continues to evolve our platform to deliver additional intelligent, open platform experiences for the future. So, what’s coming up?

In the coming months, Egencia customers will benefit from several feature releases, including:

  • Optimizing air travel spend. Expansion of air credit and unused ticket features to customers in Europe and Asia-Pacific. This follows several initiatives that are helping our customers ensure they don’t lose money.
  • Science that drives savings. Dynamic hotel rate cap policy informed by Egencia business and customer travel data which delivers savings powered by machine learning. Egencia will continue to build on its rich history of innovation with the upcoming launch of dynamic hotel policy rate caps. Built by our dedicated, in-house data science team, this new feature follows previous savings tools such as Egencia Smart Mix and Egencia Savings Finder for air and hotel.
  • Smarter, sustainable travel choices. Trialed as part of Egencia’s pilot programme, travellers will have a new air and rail shopping comparison, enabling the environmentally conscious traveller to make more informed booking selections.
  • More APIs delivering fast access to data. Building on several API’s released to customers such as expense, user profile data and reporting, customers will benefit from even more with APIs that deliver trip approval and cancelations.

For travellers and travel arrangers, it’s the small things that matter. Want to cancel a flight quickly after the ticket has been issued? Need fast help on the road? Need to change your itinerary after the airline cancels your flight or want to make sure you're able to apply credits to your flights? With automation and information directly at travellers’ fingertips our customers save time with frictionless booking experiences that let them quickly return to their day jobs.

Whether it’s reporting to C-level management to demonstrate the value of a managed travel programme to the business and its travellers, or accessing the information needed to inform corporate sustainability initiatives, Egencia customers rely on the delivery of data and insights that help their business grow, while effectively managing an evolving risk environment.

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