Microsoft Urges 'Purposeful' Travel in New Platform

Business travel must evolve to have "higher impact, lower footprint and greater inclusivity" as it recovers from the Covid-19 pandemic, according to a platform posted on LinkedIn by Eric Bailey on behalf of Microsoft Travel. 

The document was developed from Microsoft Travel’s "Purposeful Travel Summit" hosted near Carmel, Calif., last June, which included travel managers, consultants and airline, hotel, travel management company and travel technology executives. It’s not the first time the Microsoft Travel team has hosted an industry summit—in October 2017, the travel team hosted a similar gathering that resulted in an innovation-focused "manifesto" shared with the industry on LinkedIn in 2018.

The collaborative aim stated in the current document is to ensure business travel has "a clear purpose and return" with minimal impact on the environment and traveler health and performance. In turn, travel could be considered less of a cost to a company and rather an investment that provides value—indeed, enough value to justify additional costs that may be around the corner for travel like sustainability and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. 

"Travel should be linked to objectives set by the individual and company to measure the achievement of those objectives," according to the platform. "If objectives are set and clear, we can justify the investment to offset the impact on the planet and the effort put into making a meeting hybrid accessible."

Among the calls to action in the platform:

Travel management, overall, should operate beyond logistics to determine travel purpose and value. This may not be the purview of the travel manager, but the systems and structures should support that level of decision-making for people managers and the organization.People-to-people connections should become the focus of travel, and to that point, travelers should have maximum access to data, within the protocols of data privacy requirements, that could help them get the most out of their trip, including conference attendee lists, local social media contacts and arrival information of attendees.Post-trip reporting should focus more on "success reports" than expense reports, which will require a way to quantify social capital built during a trip.The corporate travel industry should collaborate more and have "one consistent voice" in lobbying for regulatory changes and investment for travel sustainability. In particular, the industry should focus on "needle movers" that can reduce emissions in the long term, such as establishing long-term contracts with airlines that support sustainable aviation fuel or redesigning aircraft routing networks.Employees should all have "the same insights and opportunities to connect with business partners no matter their physical, mental or cultural uniqueness or financial limitations," according to the platform. Paths there could include transferable profiles that include preferences in needs that can follow travelers anywhere they work as well as integrated and improved virtual options for those who cannot or will not travel.Travel should be more closely aligned with HR departments, which already measure employee engagement factors and could link those to travel.

The platform paper acknowledged that delivering tangible products, services and policies based on its conclusions would be "hard work" and require the industry to "fundamentally shift our thinking and actions." The traditional travel management approach, after all, has focused less on the actual meat of the trip and more on the process of getting there.

"A business trip is not about the flight or the hotel; it is about the value derived from being face to face," according to the platform. "Policy approaches have led us to micromanage travel and focus heavily on booking and expensing through a cost minimization lens rather than a view of investing for value."

Disclosure: One day following the June meeting in Carmel, summit attendees presented the initial output at the 11th Annual BTN Summit in Pebble Beach to solicit further input from industry leaders. The BTN Group editorial team played no role in the summit or in the production of the platform paper.