Keeping up to date with the latest trends and challenges in corporate travel

As part of its Turkish Airlines Corporate Club program designed exclusively for corporate customers, Turkish Airlines hosted last week the Turkish Airlines Corporate Club Conference held in collaboration with the Global Business Travel Association (GBTA).

Turkish Airlines brought together more than 1200 guests from 75 nationalities in Istanbul, Turkey, to celebrate the 10th anniversary. With this occasion, dcs plus attended the event that welcomed great names of the global business travel industry in Istanbul, discussing the latest trends from corporate travel sector.

Held under the main theme of “Expanding the opportunities”, the conference started with some key insights from GBTA side regarding the latest trends from business travel, travel programs challenges, development of risk management policies to communication with travelers during emergency situations.

The power tends to be in the hands of the business traveler and this, combined with the significant costs associated with the corporate travel, will ask for robust technology that can ensure the compliance of any travel program while maintaining a people-first attitude.

Suddenly, I remembered our past internal discussions and debates with our CSBT team on how we see the future of our corporate self-booking, the vision of our product, from developments in the travel policy configurations aria to latest technology based on Artificial Intelligence. All our actual and future developments in our roadmap were there 😊, somehow the key to (travelers and corporate) happiness.

The event continued with other great panels on several topics like “Key to happiness”, “Understanding Total Trip Costs” etc. The stakes are high when it comes to travel expenses. If you didn’t know by now, for many businesses worldwide they represent the second-largest line of expenditure after payroll. Companies need to prioritize setting objectives for return on this investment and one of the most important steps to be considered towards this, is calculating the true cost of business travel. And in some cases, understanding the total trip costs is harder than you might think, aggregating all the data from several sources, and how TMCs and technology play a crucial role for the final scope.

The event closed with one of our favorite topics “Hot Technologies 2019” and how certain technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Virtual reality and machine learning (i.e. predictive analytics) will shape the future of travel. With some inspirational takeaways from Istanbul, I was heading back to Bucharest with the thought that great things will come with our new booking tool CSBT and how we are playing AI to make sure that our technology offering is riding First Class for the corporate world.