The business travel agency community has been one of those most impacted from the pandemic and consequent economic downturn and likely won't see strong signs of recovery for a while. With the explosion of online collaboration and video conference technologies, in addition to shelter-in-place policies, many corporations have drastically cut their business travel activity and likely won't go back to the original volume in the near term, even when all travel bans and barriers have lifted around the world.
Many TMCs have started to think about how the new norm will affect business and have decided to help drive the recovery within their community of corporate customers and agency peers.
The business travel agency community has been one of those most impacted from the pandemic and consequent economic downturn and likely won't see strong signs of recovery for a while. With the explosion of online collaboration and video conference technologies, in addition to Shelter-in-Place policies, many corporations have drastically cut their business travel activity and likely won't go back to the original volume in the near term, even when all travel bans and barriers have lifted around the world. Many TMC have started to think about how the new norm will affect business and have decided to help drive the recovery within their community of corporate customers and agency peers.
JTB Business Travel is a major TMC with more than 500 offices in the world. They took the strategic decision to become a 100% work-from-home company since 2018, so when Covid-19 disrupted the travel industry, they were spared significant impact from shelter-in-Place polices and were able to continue operations with pretty much zero impact on daily operations.
JTB Business Travel felt they could support their corporate customers not only by providing extra support service, but also by organizing a series of free TechTalks to provide professional and technical insights from industry experts and top players. Sabre had the pleasure of participating in a couple of these events, to provide some support from our expertise. To help travelers and corporations navigate the new "norm", we focused our session on how our solutions help make travel easier on the travelers along with the corporation. For example, we talked about impacts the virus made on travel with regards to payment challenges (eg. How to help business travelers not willing to use their own cards but not having a corporate card). We also spoke to what travel could look like post Covid-19 and how travel will be different on the other side. Corporate Travel Managers can use this time to prepare and even implement solutions while travel is slow.
JTB efforts to help did not stop here. As the pandemic slowed and first sights of recovery appeared in some areas of the world, they organized another series of live, virtual round-table sessions called "Restoring Business Traveler Confidence" to support agencies and corporations in understanding efforts being made to ensure traveler safety and help everyone get back to working and traveling with confidence.
JTB is also offering free assistance to travel agencies in the following areas:
"JTB has been around for over 100 years. Over those years we have seen a lot of change and successfully weathered many storms. We have done this in part by combating adversity with innovation, teamwork and positive thinking. During this down-time, JTB Business Travel has taken the opportunity and focused our energy toward adding new services and creating more choices such as TechTalks and Live24 just to name a few." - Aash Shravah, General Manager
Click here to access JTB support site and info on the Restoring Business Traveler Confidence webinars.
