BCD Travel has seen double-digit percentage growth year over year in air and hotel booking activity so far this year, due in part to changing travel patterns of clients, BCD Travel global CEO Stephan Baars said.
Year to date through May, global air transactions at BCD are up 13 percent year over year, Baars said in a virtual roundtable with journalists on Tuesday. Air transactions during the period were up 16 percent year over year in the Americas, up 6 percent in Europe and up 13 percent in the Asia-Pacific region.
Hotel sales year-to-date have increased 27 percent year over year globally, including a 33 percent increase in the Americas, a 16 percent increase in Europe and a 12 percent increase in the Asia-Pacific region. That growth, Baars said, was driven not so much by an increase in hotel rates but by a “travel pattern change. Maybe they’re traveling less, combining trips and staying at the hotel longer,” he said. The growth also reflects BCD’s “heavy” investment in its hotel solutions, he added.
For full-year 2024, BCD projects global net transactions will reach 95 percent of 2019 levels, up 10 percentage points from 2023. In Europe, net transactions are forecast to be 3 percent above 2019 levels. Transactions in the Americas are forecast to reach 85 percent of 2019 levels in the Americas and 87 percent of 2019 levels in Asia-Pacific this year, according to BCD.
During the call, Baars and BCD SVP of product planning and development Yannis Karmis offered updates on several other BCD initiatives, including:
Email automation: Among its AI projects, BCD has been testing its use in helping agents respond to emails, Karmis said. Last year, it went through about 11,000 emails and reached an accuracy rate of about 97 percent. Of 530 emails classified as invoice requests, only 14 were incorrectly classified, for example. Of 462 emails classified as trip cancellation requests, only 14 were incorrectly classified.
Although the error rate is small, it demonstrated the need to still have agents involved in to process. Had any of the 14 incorrectly classified cancellation requests resulted in a cancellation, for example, it could have been disastrous.
“With the ability to deploy AI of where clients expect perfection, there’s no real tolerance of errors,” Karmis said. “We’re focused not just on improving the reliability of the bot; it’s the end-to-end processes.”
Pricing models: Pricing based on transaction fees remains “by far the dominant requested model from the customer side,” Baars said. However, customers at the same time are asking for simplicity on pricing models.
“They want few fees, easier budgeting, less international dialogue, an in principle ‘one fee fits all,’ ” he said. “Knowing that not one fits all, we try to get models in place that help the customer, done in a partnership approach so the customer feels comfortable.”
Contact center modernization: BCD expects to have its cloud-based call center infrastructure, via Genesys, “mostly rolled out by the end of August,” Karmis said. Among its new features will be the ability to request a callback for clients who are facing a lengthy wait rather than require them to stay on the line, or “last agent routing,” where customers can be connected back to their original agent when solving an issue, he said.
