"Virtual communication solutions can now replace travel in many cases". Who would have thought, when the BCD Group was founded in 1975, that a travel agency executive - April Bridgeman, senior vice president of BCD Travel and managing director of Advito - could say a thing that was incompatible with the interests of a travel agency? Times have changed, and rather than fighting against this alternative to business travel, TMC now intends to integrate this new component into its offering by joining forces with a heavyweight in the sector, Cisco. "This agreement places BCD Travel, an expert in business travel, at the forefront of the use of communication and collaboration technologies to increase the ROI of business travel programmes", according to the press release published on 28 April. According to a survey carried out last year by Advito, 81% of travel managers had access to videoconferencing or telepresence facilities, and 24% used high-end immersive systems.
Of course, the agreement signed with Cisco is not intended to replace business travel purely and simply with telepresence. "Virtual communication offers many more advantages than simply saving on travel costs," stresses Andre Smit, Global Head of Cisco's Communication Solutions Sales Division. BCD Travel and Advito intend to integrate this new partnership into a more global approach to "Total Collaboration Management". The aim is to give employees a sense of responsibility when deciding whether or not to attend a meeting, to make it easier for them to take the right decision, and then to measure the progress made thanks to this approach.
BCD Travel is well placed to take up this issue. Remember that when it moved at the end of 2014 - from the 10th to the 2nd arrondissement of Paris - the business travel agency also announced that 20% of its staff would be adopting teleworking. "The coming months will enable us to measure the success of teleworking in Paris" explained Jean-François Lahitte, Human Resources Director at BCD Travel France, at the time, adding: "We also intend to encourage this practice in Montpellier and Lille". So we can't blame TMC for not applying the good advice given to its corporate clients...
