TRAVEL MANAGEMENT

Prepaid, prepaid, virtual or, more traditionally, credit cards: corporate payment cards all have their advantages to appeal to companies. But they are all part of the same strategy: optimising travel expenditure.

On the eve of the new tax imposed by Lufthansa on GDS bookings, business travel buyers are considering reducing their expenditure with the German carrier. In any case, this is what emerges from a GBTA survey published on 27 August on the American market.

On 3 September, the 2015 edition of Univ'AirPlus will open its doors at the OECD headquarters in Paris. The back-to-school ritual for the business travel market will be celebrating its tenth anniversary: an event that AirPlus intends to mark with a bang, with a solid programme of conferences under the Travelution banner. 

Carlson Wagonlit Travel and the GBTA Foundation (Global Business Travel Association) have published their 2016 Global Business Travel Price Forecast report. The study highlights the relative stability of fares, particularly in the European market.

Bird Office has published a study on the behaviour of French employees in the office during the summer. The meeting room reservation platform looked in particular at the influence of this summer lull on the world of meetings, their pace, their performance and their real motivation.

More and more business travellers are combining tourism with business trips. This phenomenon presents companies with the challenge of managing these hybrid trips and clarifying the responsibilities of each party.

The GBTA Foundation and Sabre have published the Travel Manager 2020 study, dedicated to the changing role of the Travel Manager in the company, and the influence of new technologies, mobile phones and virtual payment. 

Certify, the Travel & Expense specialist, has just published its traditional SpendSmart report. The quarterly report, which examines business travellers' expense accounts, confirms the advent of the "sharing economy" in business travel. For the first time, Uber expenditure has exceeded that generated by taxis. 

Rethink Technology and iPass have published the Cost of Connectivity Index for business travellers: an opportunity to better measure the financial impact of technological mobility, depending on the type of connection (4g or WiFi).

It's almost official. From 1 July, French citizens travelling to Vietnam will no longer need a visa for stays of up to 14 days.

Who are the French business travellers of today: this is the title of the study published by Aparthotels Adagio. It reveals that generation Y now accounts for 22.5% of business travel, with all that this implies in terms of new expectations and new uses. Bleisure" is also targeted as one of the major future trends for aparthotels.

On Tuesday at the Radisson Blu Boulogne, GBTA France organised an afterwork dedicated to the new NDC (New Distribution Capability) standard, promoted by IATA and set to transform distribution in the airline sector. The discussions between Yanik Hoyles, Director of the NDC programme at IATA, and Alexandre Jorre, Marketing Director at Amadeus, provided a clearer picture of the new prospects offered by the NDC standard to the various players in the market, as well as identifying the grey areas that remain as regards the possible applications of these multiple uses.

Generating emotions and values, major sporting events are excellent motivational tools for companies. The choice is vast, and there's something for everyone.

The KDS Now event was held at the Salle Wagram in Paris on Thursday. The theme of this 5th edition was the personalisation of the door-to-door tools developed by KDS, and preceded the launch of the KDS Neo Move application.

The Carlson group has announced the acquisition of Ormès, a French MICE specialist and long-standing player in the market. Combined with TMC's Meetings & Events division, this new asset should make CWT a major player in the MICE market. The deal also illustrates the potential synergies between business travel and MICE, which have been mooted for several years without any major concrete progress in France. 

Frequent Flyer Travel Paris has signed an agreement with Dream Concept. The MICE brand will thus be exploited exclusively by the business travel agency, which intends to promote the Travel MICE concept, focusing in particular on rationalising expenditure and measuring return on investment. 

Paris tops the world rankings published on 11 May by the ICCA association, which compiles the 2014 statistics for meetings. France is ranked 5th by country. 

Yan Dalla-Pria is a sociologist and lecturer at the University of Paris Ouest Nanterre-La Défense, and a speaker on corporate sport issues.

With a plethora of hotels to choose from and booking solutions that are not entirely effective, companies have long found it difficult to control their hotel expenditure. But the sector is changing fast. And, above all, it's moving in the right direction.

Ford has published a European study showing that professionals are more stressed by the journey to and from work than by the work itself.