With airline revenues decimated by the Covid-19 pandemic, it would seem that investment in rolling out IATA's New Distribution Capability (NDC) has come to a standstill. A Sabre executive recently said that "the vast majority of airlines have paused or completely stopped their NDC activity". Certainly, there has seemed to be little public activity around NDC. But is that really the case? Has Covid derailed NDC or has it spurred airlines and intermediaries into working har...

Last week, the UK’s transport secretary Grant Shapps announced a change to the entry regulations for England, meaning that anyone who has completed a full course of vaccinations against Covid will now be allowed to enter the country without having to self-isolate. Yet business travel has been on its knees for 15 months and even this reopening comes with barriers. We have heard again this week that another TMC has ceased trading. Is it all too little, too late for the sector. We discuss the im...

The Covid crisis has brought the question of how your bookings should be serviced under greater scrutiny. Regularly changing regulations and border closures now mean that many bookings now require some hand-holding in a way they did not before. Recent years have seen many corporates shift their programme from offline to online in order to drive savings but has that now been reversed? The rise of online travel management platforms has also led corporates to question whether there should be a g...

Business travel has been decimated over the past 15 months but that hasn’t stopped some companies from changing their travel management company. Indeed, some corporates have taken the time when things have been quieter to rethink their relationship with their incumbent TMC. The pandemic has also seen some TMCs fail, others to look shaky and more to consolidate, causing their clients to have to think about a new TMC. In the latest edition of our Week in Review podcast we talk about what ...

Despite, or is it because of, Covid, the corporate focus on sustainability has continued. Barely a day passes without someone in the business travel sector announcing a new sustainability initiative – whether that’s a new commitment to sustainable aviation fuels, a TMC announcing that it has set up a new carbon offset scheme or a corporate saying that business travel is going to be replaced with video-conferencing in order for it to meet its strategic net zero targets. Just recently, we have ...

The Covid pandemic has caused a crisis in the TMC sector. The decimation of business travel and the lack of any real signs of when things will return to some form of normality has meant that many TMCs have failed – companies like Horncastle Executive with long proud histories went to the wall. Ever since the start of the pandemic it has seemed inevitable that there would be a wave of consolidation as owners and investors wanted to cash out of an industry that may take years to recover and, in...

Bill Gates has said that 50 per cent of business travel would go following the pandemic, but he would say that, wouldn't he? His company Microsoft has a very powerful alternative to business travel in teams, after all. Yet many companies have used the virtual standstill of business travel due to Covid to take stock of what parts of business travel are essential. You could argue that many businesses have survived well enough without travelling at all. Companies are now having to focus more cl...

Many countries and companies have set a target of making zero carbon emissions. Some are already there while others expect to get there at some point between now and 2050. Some have done so by investing in carbon offsetting schemes while others have made concrete efforts to rethink their operations to remove carbon dioxide from the process. For the companies that have committed to cutting carbon, business travel is often in their sights, particularly after the Covid pandemic showed that many ...

In the UK, more than 30 million people have been vaccinated; in Norway, the number is just 800,000. Yet there are two ends to any business trip so even if everyone in the UK is vaccinated it does not mean that other countries will be ready to welcome them. Governmental approaches to business travel also vary. In some, business travel is considered an exemption to restrictions on travel; in others, business travellers are advised to stay at home. The European Union – built on the idea of freed...

One of the biggest issues in the travel sector since the start of the pandemic has been the thorny issue of refunds. When global travel was effectively stopped, the industry had to work out what to do about the tickets that had already been paid for. Companies and individuals had paid out billions of euros, pounds and dollars on tickets that would no longer be used. Where did that money sit? Could you get it back and within what timescale? Some airlines said they wouldn’t give money bac...

In the past two weeks there have been two stories which jumped to the top of the most popular list on BTN Europe. The first was the news that Emirates is to start charging for GDS content from July, on the same day that it launches exclusive content on its direct connect platform, Emirates Gateway, enabled by IATA’s New Distribution Capability (NDC). The second was that International Airlines Group, the parent of British Airways, Iberia and Aer Lingus, had reached a deal to give Amadeus-conne...

In this week's episode we look at the growing discussion around digital health or vaccine passports and whether they are a solution to reopen locked international borders. This week's podcast is hosted by BTN Europe digital editor Mark Frary along with Nike’s Daniel Tallos, David Bishop of Gray Dawes Group, William Sandover a former chair of the GBTA (Europe) Risk Committee and previously an International Risk Adviser to British Airways, and Simon Talling-Smith, president of Commo...

In this week's episode we discuss the findings of the Global Business Travel Association's BTI Outlook which forecasts that global business travel spend will recover to 2019 levels by 2025. This week's podcast is hosted by BTN Europe digital editor Mark Frary along with Festive Road's Paul Tilstone, EY's Karen Hutchings, Advantage Travel Partnership's Julia Lo Bue-Said and Mondelez International's Adrian Witschi. We discuss how the recovery will happen at different speeds in different region...

Goodness knows this past year has been hard on everyone’s mental health and well-being but maybe it is now time to consider those two things more seriously when we finally emerge from this dreadful pandemic. This week's podcast is hosted by BTN Europe digital editor Mark Frary along with psychologist Dr Lucy Rattrie, David Bishop of Gray Dawes Group, Nike’s Daniel Tallos and Carolyn Pearson, CEO of Maiden Voyage, a consultancy specialising in safety training for business travellers. In the p...

Happy new year or is it? The word happy seems a bit hollow in a world where a new wave of Covid is killing thousands every day across the world, countries have been slapped into lockdown and the ability to leave our homes, let alone our countries, has been restricted. And that’s without mentioning what certain politicians and protestors have been up to this week. Yet despite the gloom there is hope – accelerating vaccination programmes should help us get back to normal in 2021. While al...

This week, quarantine for arriving travellers in the UK has been cut from from 14 to 10 days. The government’s test to release scheme – which allows people arriving in England to cut their quarantine in half if, after five days, they get a negative Covid test – was launched, although it was quickly overwhelmed and attracted criticism. In Europe, the Netherlands and Germany announced stricter lockdowns while France emerged from a weeks-long one. In the UK, London and much of the south of...

A couple of weeks ago, BTN Europe published a story about some comments that Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates had said about the future of business travel, saying that he believed that 50 per cent of business travel would go. The story rapidly generated indignation from a number of companies in the business travel sector. So what will the new level of business travel post Covid actually be? Answering that question on the BTN Europe Week in Review podcast are Jason Geall, Vice Presiden...

This week's podcast is brought to you by host Mark Frary, BTN Europe acting digital editor, and Nikki Ping, manager, air content & distribution EMEA at Flight Centre Travel Group, Daniel Tallos, travel manager EMEA at Nike, Dave Bishop, CCO at Gray Dawes Group, and Paul Tilstone, managing partner at Festive Road. This week we look at what changes the airlines have been making during the Covid pandemic and whether things will revert to normal once it is over. The pandemic has seen...

This week's podcast is hosted by BTN Europe acting digital editor Mark Frary, with Daniel Tallos, travel manager EMEA at Nike, Karen Hutchings, global head of travel, meetings and events for EY, Dave Bishop, CCO at Gray Dawes Group, and Paul Tilstone, managing partner at Festive Road. This week we are look at what the end of the office – if that is what we are now moving towards – means for business travel. Much of the world has not been in the office for months and surveys show...

This week's podcast is hosted by BTN Europe acting digital editor Mark Frary, with Daniel Tallos, travel manager EMEA at Nike, Karen Hutchings, global head of travel, meetings and events for EY, Dave Bishop, CCO at Gray Dawes Group, and Paul Tilstone, managing partner at Festive Road. As furlough schemes around the world unwind, we are starting to see how TMCs are having to reshape themselves for a world in which business travel does not look like it will resume any time soon. We hear...