The latest research report "Social Media in Business Travel Management" by American Express Business Travel's eXpert has revealed that social media has proven to be a useful and effective tool to share pertinent information with employees and drive change in organisations.
According to American Express Business Travel, respondents also reported high expectations regarding their companies' future social media usage plan, reporting that within the next year forums, webcasts, and online video are the most likely to be implemented by businesses.
Social media has evolved to play a role in business travel programmes. While half (50%) of respondents said that they use social media to some extent to support travel management today, mid-size companies ($3M to $10M USD in air volume) were the largest adopters (59%) of social media to support business travel management to date.
Many respondents indicated that the primary benefit of social media in supporting managed travel is educating themselves or their organisation about the market. In fact, 44% indicated that staying on top of the latest travel information was the most important social media benefit. This response was followed closely by the interest in using social networking to learn and communicate best practices and reduce business travel costs (43%).
Other findings include:
- 42% use social networking to look for preferred vendors and services from travellers
- 34% seek to uncover travel patterns that could lend to better vendor rates and services
- 26% use social media tools to encourage travellers to network with each other
- 18% network with other travel manager/procurement officer peers.
Of those survey respondents who do use social media to support travel management, when asked specifically what features or functionality would they add if they could design their own social media tools for professional use, the majority (61%) indicated they wanted flexibility to accommodate business travel management processes.
Other top ranking features/functionality include:
- Real time updates such as mobile application, the ability to push out notifications and alerts (39%)
- Supervision of the entire social media sharing process and specific monitoring of those using social media tools (35%)
- Reporting ability - notification to website abuse, comments and security issues (29%).
The most significant barrier to adoption of social media as an organization has been the lack of direct benefits realization, 20% found the business case for social media tools and usage within travel management programs unclear. Lack of strategy or understanding and lack of support from upper management each followed at 15% respectively.
Notably, only 5% of respondents indicated that they have had no barriers or challenges to adopt social media tools as an organization.
(Eye for Travel, July 2010)
