Kids today! Won’t use the corporate travel policy, want to choose their own rental car company, no respect for “compliance” or “mandates”—and that is a real problem, says Alicia Tillman, vice president of marketing and business services for American Express Global Business Travel. More than half of hotel reservations for business travel are made outside a company-designated booking channel, according to Concur Technologies, a large supplier of corporate travel software. Can you believe?
The solution is obvious: Make booking corporate travel more like Angry Birds or Foursquare. Turn it into a game. Award badges. Make it fun. Last week, American Express began a trial with Citrix Systems, the maker of desktop virtualization software, to award points and badges to 100 Citrix employees who travel for their jobs. ”We can either post the 50-200-page travel policy on a company’s intranet page, or we can align compliance with something that’s more fun,” Tillman says. Another three dozen companies have expressed interest in trying a similar approach, she says.
