Sourcing the right destination to hold a corporate meeting or event can be time-consuming, costly and often challenging from an availability perspective, which can result in significant travel spend leakage.
Lightning’s new door-to-door trip builder uses AI to create an entire policy compliant trip, including flights, hotels, trains, car rental, airport parking and lounge passes, using just the traveller’s preferred destination. CTM is now expanding this functionality to allow travel bookers and meetings coordinators to seamlessly source appropriate venues and book door-to-door itineraries for groups of two to eight travellers. Door-to-door+ uses AI to translate a single set of meeting requirements into a range of destination and venue recommendations, and individually tailored door-to-door travel itineraries for each attendee, all in an instant.
Corporate Travel Management’s Chief Technology Officer EMEA, Brian Sheerin explained, “Business travel is about meeting face-to-face, so when we built the ability to connect an entire trip together into one itinerary, we knew there would be huge benefits to scaling that to handle groups. The technology scales excellently for small meetings and team offsites, providing a great selection of options but not overwhelming team leaders who just need to find the best location.
“Planning small team meetings, a sales kick off or quarterly Board meeting should be fast and flexible, without the time, cost or complexity of a large scale event or engaging a full meetings management solution. As we build more AI into Lightning, customers are enjoying greater efficiencies and the ability to plan their travel and meetings in new and exciting ways that keep costs down while maximising choice and policy compliance.”
Lightning’s AI-powered door-to-door trip builder for small groups and meetings is currently in pilot with select CTM customers and is due for general UK release throughout the summer.
Tags: Brian Sheerin, Corporate Travel Management (CTM)
