1. Loosening of Corporate T&E Policies
No, you didn’t read that wrong. Companies with modern automated tools will relax their travel and expense policies, because they now have so much granular T&E data. This might come as a surprise, but we at Coupa are seeing many of our customers undergoing a once-in-a-generation cultural shift. Given the rise of knowledge workers, the competition for talent and the focus on employee happiness and business agility in today’s leading organizations, companies are striving to find ways to give their employees more flexibility. With the data and technology now available to administrators, many companies are starting to relax their policies in core areas in order to give their employees more flexibility, while still protecting the organization from fraud.
2. Ground Travel Prices Fall Rapidly
Ground travel (Uber, taxis, limos) is one area where prices have been decreasing and will continue to do so. Black car services will continue to lose share to Uber and Lyft, as the car sharing titans roll out more corporate-friendly controls and reporting. Gaining corporate clients has been harder for pink-mustachioed Lyft, but it scored a major win when Apple announced them as a preferred partner last spring.
Besides increased competition, lower costs are also driving prices down. Newer, more fuel-efficient cars make up a bigger share of fleets, on top of already-low oil prices. And we haven’t even talked about the one thing that could cause rates to plummet: driverless cars. In today’s world, fuel isn’t the biggest cost. Neither is the car itself – cars today are made so well they can easily last for ten years or more. The biggest cost is the human driver. Without drivers, rates for rides could fall by as much as 90 percent over the next two or three years, according to analysts. That would be transformational, indeed.
3. Virtual Assistants Everywhere
Since we are getting futuristic here, let us go out on a limb and predict that in 2017, every employee will have an assistant, not just executives. These assistants will be virtual, not physical. With Apple’s Siri, the Google Home Assistant, and the Amazon Echo, we have been exposed to the grand idea of a digital helper a la Rosie the Robot.
While many business travelers have already experienced a degree of this with mobile apps that do things such as automatically fill out your expense lines based on geolocation data, or let you speak your expenses into your smartphone, there is still a long way to go until we achieve the dream scenario of simply typing in your destination and desired dates and not only having the perfect itinerary hit your email inbox, but also knowing that your virtual assistant will automatically complete your expense reports. 2017 is the year where this starts to happen. Prepare to welcome our (friendly) robot overlords.
