Before the start of the new business travel season, the editorial board of Travel Russian News discussed with colleagues from IBC Corporate Travel the main trends and directions of development of the corporate tourism segment.
In the summer of 2023, only a few IBC Corporate Travel customers went on vacation. The vast majority of customers in the summer are busy revising their travel policies towards increasing the limits for their business travelers. And companies where there has been a significant expansion of staff use June, July and August to organize large-scale employee training in the online booking tool.
In the upcoming business season, IBC Corporate Travel experts expect:
- continued migration of customers from offline to online: if now the pool of online customers consists mainly of large customers, then in the autumn their number will be replenished by smaller customers;
- an increase in the number of travelers who entrust personal trips to their business travel agencies;
- strengthening the trend towards standardization of business trips within one group of companies, avoiding the breakdown of corporate rules by branches or divisions.
In the 2023-2024 season, customers will pay special attention to dynamic business trip reports.
“Managers want to be able to see in real time who is going on a business trip, where and why. — explains Marat Agliulin, Head of the IBC Corporate Travel Client division. — If now about 30% of our clients are companies with a thorough approach to business travel analytics, then in the coming business season we predict that there will be 50% of them. Consequently, the number of requests for prompt provision and competent visualization of data will increase.”
The MICE department of the IBC Corporate Travel agency predicts that in the near future, destinations at the junction of digital transformation and a human approach will become in demand. At first glance, completely opposite concepts are equally valuable in the field of business tourism. And when Digit automates, optimizes and facilitates the routine work of organizers of business trips and MICE events, the human approach is reflected in such things as concierge service, customer support, author tours and VIP escort for individual tourists.
At the same time, MICE tourism specialists themselves must be innovators and offer customers something new every time. In this perspective, industrial tourism can be safely called a novelty.
According to the specialists of the MICE department of IBC Corporate Travel, the creation of industrial clusters attractive to tourists on their territory and the organization of special events (for example, festivals) automatically updates the pool of opportunities for MICE tourism.
Over the past 3-5 years, an unprecedented number of enterprises from the field of mechanical engineering, nuclear energy, food industry, metallurgy, mining, shipbuilding and many others have entered the arena of the tourist market.
“If the customer requests an off-site event in a city where he has never been, then, of course, a landmark for sightseeing tours. But if we create a cultural program for a city that the customer is familiar with, then industrial tourism becomes literally a source of new ideas,” explains Ekaterina Starkova, supervisor of the MICE department of IBC Corporate Travel.
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