Advito’s May update to the 2012 Industry Forecast, is based on an assessment of current economic parameters, including year-over-year booking data from the fourth quarter. Advito has revised upward its initial 2012 airfare forecasts for Latin America and the Middle East since release of its February Update.

“Given current macroeconomic volatility, we caution buyers that the Advito forecast is more subject to change than usual,” said Bob Brindley, vice president for Advito, an independent operating unit of BCD Travel. “Outright recession in major markets, a subsequent drop in consumer confidence and a potential credit crunch from banks unwilling to lend could lead to a significant fall-off in demand. If that happens, airlines will have a much harder time sustaining projected fare increases and airfares could fall.”

Other key findings in Advito’s May Update to the 2012 Industry Forecast include:

• Europe’s financial crisis is not yet over, but tensions are easing a little following implementation of an early warning mechanism. Rising bond yields in Italy and Spain, however, remain cause for concern.
• U.S.economic indicators have stabilized, and new strength in recent months is sparking an uptick in economic optimism worldwide.
• Air travel demand is set to outpace supply, given ongoing capacity cuts by airlines. The imbalance has already resulted in some price hikes in the U.S.and looks likely to lead to similar hikes in other regions over the course of 2012.
• Changes to hotel rate forecasts are limited to Argentina (high inflation), Switzerland (being less affected by European woes), India (increasing inventory), the Czech Republic (fallout from the Eurozone crisis), and Russia (softened demand).

For more detailed information on key trends in travel management for 2012, as well as recommendations for travel buyers, please refer back to the original Advito 2012 Industry Forecast.

SYDNEY, 10 May 2012  – BCD Travel, the world’s third largest corporate travel management company and a leading TMC in Australia, on 30 July 2012 will open its first office in Western Australia. Located in Perth, the office will serve an ever-growing client base in Western Australia, led by the natural resources sector.

Managing Director  Louise Wheeler says, “BCD Travel is proud of the level of service and depth of experience we’re able to provide companies across a range of travel program sophistication. Many companies in Western Australia, including those in the natural resources sector, require a full service TMC with the ability to serve as a trusted advisor and partner. We look forward to growing with the economic engine for Western Australia.”

Australia’s fourth largest city,Perthemploys more than one million and generates over 14 percent of Australia’s Gross Domestic Product.Western Australia’s population grew by 2.63 percent in the last quarter, with the resource sector being a key driver of the region’s economy.

BCD Travel services clients in a wide range of industries including pharmaceuticals, construction, technology, healthcare, software, finance, manufacturing and transportation. “With global and local expertise, flexibility and best-in-class technology we are committed to bringing service excellence to our current and future clients across all sectors,” says Wheeler.

BCD Travel’s new office will be located in the newly-constructed Equus building on Hay Street in the centre of the central business district.

Economic overview
Indonesia outperformed most of its regional neighbors during the recent recession and has continued to weather the global financial crisis relatively well because of strong domestic consumption. Investment by both local and foreign investors also supports growth, although foreign direct investment has declined because of the economic turndown in other regions. The Indonesian economy slowed to 4.5 percent growth in 2009, but by 2010 growth had returned to a 6 percent growth rate — on par with 2007 and 2008. Retail, telecommunications, banking and insurance sectors are expected to grow in 2012.

Business travel industry insight
About 7.7 million travelers visited Indonesia in 2011, although some came to the country for leisure, rather than business. Hoteliers continue to invest in both major and secondary cities in Indonesia, expanding both international and homegrown brands.

Business travel opportunities

• Indonesia expects 8 million arrivals and US$8 billion in tourism receipts for the inbound market this year.
• A growing number of low-cost carriers are connecting regional destinations with Indonesia’s secondary cities.
• Garuda Indonesia airline plans domestic and regional expansion, which will boost traffic.
• The middle class is growing steadily in Indonesia, boosting business and leisure travel demand.

Business travel challenges

• Penetration of central billing account/credit card payments is low. Most payments are on invoice systems with 30- to 60-day credit terms.
• Domestic airlines use their own booking systems.
• Hotels in remote areas conduct business via telephone and fax and require cash payment in advance to hold reservations.
• Car rentals in remote areas are locally owned and often cannot comply with corporate procurement or security standards.
• Last-minute habits persist among local travelers; most don’t plan trips in advance.
• Visa difficulties regularly hamper outbound travelers.

When your business expands into new markets, BCD Travel can get your travelers where they need to be. Talk to your account manager to find out more about how we can support your company’s growth.

They’re super luxurious in design and offer stressed and weary business travellers a broad range of relaxation services including spa treatments, saunas, pools, snooker tables, cinemas and even beds!

To view the photos, click here.

This month, BCD Travel’s Melbourne business travel office recommends booking flights and accommodation early for corporate travel in the last week of the month or early June, with thousands of foodies heading to Melbourne for the Good Food & Wine Show on June 1-3.

The Show is also on at the Sydney Convention Centre on June 22-24.

You can download BCD Travel’s 2012 National Event Calendar here.

1. Corporate travellers should keep their meetings formal and serious to suit the reserved nature of Swedish businesspeople
2. The Swedes like their personal space so avoid any unnecessary touching
3. Decisions are often made by teams of managers, rather than individuals. Business travellers should engage with everyone at the table during meetings
4. Swedes are very direct and don’t like ‘small talk’. Expect to get straight down to business at meetings and always stick to the agenda
5. Swedes like detail so business travellers should be meticulous with their presentations

The online survey involved 28,000 consumers in 56 countries.  Of all the world’s regions, CSR had the biggest impact on consumers in the Asia-Pacific with 55% saying CSR impacts their buying decisions.

The corporate travel management industry is increasing its CSR involvement, with BCD Travel – the world’s third largest business travel management company, recently sending a comprehensive report to the UN on its CSR activities across the globe.

With its fresh approach to business travel, BCD Travel’s programs include championing business traveller safety and enabling a reduction of its corporate travel clients’ carbon footprints. BCD Travel Australia partners with Climate Friendly to allow corporate travellers to offset their business travel greenhouse emissions by purchasing carbon credits via the FlightPortal tool.

In Australia, Qantas has created Family Zones at selected Qantas Club airport lounges, with plenty of toys and video games to keep the kids occupied. The Family Zones are available at the Melbourne International Business Lounge; Sydney Domestic Qantas Club in T3; Sydney International Business Lounge; Brisbane Qantas Club lounge and The Qantas Club Cairns; with more to follow soon.

Meanwhile, some airlines have taken it one step further by offering child-free flights. Malaysia Airlines is now banning children from the top deck of its A380 aircraft on the London to Kuala Lumpur route, with the same to be offered on flights to Sydney from September this year.

Canadian carrier, WestJet has introduced its ‘Kargo Kids’ program, where children are seated in a separate area of the plane to allow peace and quiet for business travellers in other sections.

Consolidating management information from different sources such as TMCs, cards and expense management systems is more important than ever, but it is also very hard to achieve. Now solutions are beginning to appear on the market.

Travel managers are fighting a never-ending battle against costs, and the key weapon in their arsenal is data. Management information is used for numerous critical tasks, including monitoring policy compliance, negotiating with suppliers and keeping an eye on process efficiencies. Yet fully leveraging this information often feels like mission impossible to buyers if they cannot properly combine different sources of high-quality intelligence to give full visibility into spend. “They are often flying half blind because the data they receive is not integrated,” says Torsten Kriedt, vice-president of product planning and intelligence for BCD Travel.

One problem is that no travel manager can extract all the necessary data from just one source. A travel management company provides detailed information on what is booked before a journey, especially air, but a travel manager also needs to know about en route spend to gain a proper understanding of total cost of trip. Understanding en route spend has wide-ranging implications, Kriedt says. Armed with the right data — and data analysis — travel managers can understand the effect suppliers, travel patterns and policy decisions have on this en route spend; invest their time in areas where they will get the best return; and, ultimately, make informed decisions about balancing traveler service and bottom-line costs.

Expense management systems increasingly provide en route information, but they can lack detail and are often inconsistent across different markets. Credit cards also play their part, but, once again, the quality of the data varies among different issuers and regions. Some vendors – most notably car rental companies – can provide excellent direct invoicing information, but this only multiplies the need for data consolidation.

Multinational companies face a big challenge in bringing different strands of data together. Instead of integrating from only one TMC, one expense management system and one card provider, a multinational company might deploy several of each across the world.

“Companies don’t want to go through 20 different sources to get their data,” says Cécile Soulier, senior director of product planning for BCD Travel. “Most don’t know where to start. There may be some connections between different information sets, such as a credit card feed populating the expense management system, but generally there is nothing that provides a complete picture.”

It is tempting to invest in a business intelligence or data visualization tool to bring all the data sources together. Yet to achieve a complete picture requires more than just a tool: The solution must be “smart” enough to reconcile different data feeds without duplication and to match transactions logically. For example, card data might show a company’s travelers stayed at a Novotel and a Sofitel in the same city, whereas the expense management system labels both properties as Accor, the owner of both brands. The integration tool needs to spot and rationalize the relationship between the names to identify who stayed where and not to record the same stay twice. Another common problem is dates. “Some data sources base their information on date of travel, others on date of payment,” says Kriedt. “The risk of duplicate information is high.

“But this is not where it ends,” he adds. “To be relevant, the different trip components, such as air, rail, hotel and meals, need to be brought together for a total trip analysis — be it to understand the typical cost per trip, to spot compliance issues regarding booked versus expensed costs or to influence behavior in the categories that are often still unmanaged, like ancillary fees or ground transportation.”

To enhance Third-Party Data Integration solutions already in place, BCD Travel earlier this year signed an exclusive partnership with data consolidation and spend analysis specialist PI Benchmark. PI Benchmark offers a process that integrates data from any number of sources into a single data set using powerful, proprietary matching logic. It then presents the resulting insights in a format that can be manipulated and can lead to action.

Experts from BCD Travel and Advito, BCD Travel’s independent consulting group, have worked with PI Benchmark over the last 18 months to create analysis templates that address the typical questions travel managers ask around their program profiles, traveler behavior patterns and compliance and supplier management. Travel managers can easily interrogate the interactive dashboards, clicking to drill down to business-unit or even individual-traveler levels.

For example, a travel manager might use PI Benchmark to see if booking further in advance actually achieves savings for specific, often-traveled routes.  Or she might create an interactive map showing the hotel room nights per destination and use visual layers to quickly spot destinations with highest year-over-year average daily rate changes. This helps to keep the preferred hotel program focused on targets and quickly identifies potential risks and opportunities.

PI Benchmark adds another layer to BCD Travel’s Third-Party Data Integration capabilities, which include consolidation of data across multiple agencies and reconciliation of credit card data with TMC records. Once this treasure trove of data is available, the next step is analyzing it to enable action. It is at this stage, Soulier says, that BCD Travel may engage Advito to help travel managers:

• Analyze historical trends on how travel dollars are spent, by category and supplier. Armed with this information, buyers can answer a CFO’s questions and identify cost-saving and negotiating opportunities.
• Track recent performance using metrics that indicate program effectiveness. This allows a travel manager to know which policies are working — and which ones aren’t — and to make changes that increase compliance.
• Predict future impact by creating scenarios that anticipate travel program alterations and industry and market shifts. This kind of forecasting lets travel managers make smarter, quicker decisions in times of rapid change.

Kriedt says this combination of technology tools and results-driven analysis enables a travel manager to shape a program focused on future opportunities, rather than on lost ones. It’s data integration that yields actionable visualization, and it means the travel manager no longer is flying blind in the battle against rising costs.

Want to know more about how BCD Travel’s Solution Network is supporting intelligence and analytics? Get started here.

The World Travel & Tourism Council says the global travel industry is expected to grow by 2.8% in 2012, with south and north-east Asia expected to be the fastest growing regions.

BCD Travel Australia says corporate travel is on the increase following a period of slow-down during and immediately after the GFC. Companies are once again equipped to spend money on corporate travel trips and higher quality meetings, incentives, conferences and events.