Global Corporate Travel Consolidation: Join In the Blogalogue!

Greetings, Cafe Patrons.

Believe it or not, I’ve just turned 8-months old as Barista of the Friday Morning Cafe. I’m not quite sure how blog years translate into people years, but I hope I’m about ready to start university perhaps?

In any case, I thought that given some increasing traffic (thanks everyone!) and a readiness to tackle some more weighty topics in the coming months, it was time to move the Cafe on from V1.0 and kick things up a bit. Next week I’ll debut a brand new look for the Cafe - an advance thanks to Mrs. Barista for most of the re-decorating – she’s a wizard!

To get things rolling for the new and improved Cafe, this week is part one of what I hope will be a provocative and interesting “blogalogue” (def. – a dialogue conducted within a blog) between the Cafe regulars and soon-to-be-regulars. Without giving too much away, I know that some of you visit the Cafe from travel management companies, some are from GDS or technology companies, some are corporate buyers, and many are corporate or leisure travellers in their own right. Given the one-to-many nature of blogs, it is often hard to get people actually “talking” about some of the topics in a structured way.

In the new Cafe, I propose to change this up a bit. Here’s how: over the coming weeks, I will be reaching out to a few of you who are regulars and some who may not yet be regulars, to see if we can’t get the comments section rolling (that’s the “blogalogue” part) around a particular topic. And if my own web surfing experience is any indication, it will have to be a pretty interesting topic to get people to join in the discussion on line.

So here goes.

As the world’s economy tries to put the recent GFC behind it, I believe that the differences at which recovery is progressing across various global markets is significant. On the one hand you have emerging and/or expanding markets like the BRIC and South East Asian countries that have basically already forgotten about GFC, while the US and European markets remain sluggish and uncertain.

From a corporate travel perspective, this patchy recovery could pose a very interesting dynamic in the coming years as many corporate travel program heavyweights traditionally are centred in the US/Western European markets. This centralised approach to travel management in those organisations have, over the past decade in conjunction with mega-TMC’s, often sought a “one global TMC, one global policy, one global program” approach to consolidation.

Given the last 2.5 years of GFC turmoil, one might then think that continued consolidation would be the norm given the relentless pursuit of cost-cutting many companies have embarked on.

However, given the aforementioned growth of certain “non-traditional” economies, there may be a counter-trend which could find more purchasing power emerging from Asia, South America or Eastern Europe than previously thought. As these markets are now powering much of the growth for many companies, these new “darling regions” could wield much more influence over how they operate. And given that many of the emerging global powerhouse companies are actually based in these rapidly growing markets, we could see an entirely new travel purchasing dynamic emerge.

So – the blogalogue question for Cafe goers is this: will consolidation of corporate travel programs continue apace, or will a new, fragmented yet regional-centric approach start to take shape?

I have a view on this, but in order to get the blogalogue going I’ll allow it to come out in response to the arguments posted by Cafe Patrons in the Comments section – see the link just below this posting. Again, I’ll be offering extra “shots” of advice to those of you I’ll be reaching out to over the coming week to galvanise the discussion – and by all means please feel free to bring newcomers to the Cafe, as again next week we will have a fresh new look ready to welcome them all!

Look forward to chatting with everyone.