The launch of Corporate Traveller’s new digital platform is the latest indicator of Flight Centre Travel Group’s push to consolidate the corporate travel market. At its annual AGM in November 2017, Flight Centre announced that it expects the corporate arm of the company to grow between 6.2-15.6% in its 2018 financial year. Graham Turner, Flight Centre’s managing director, announced that key to this prediction is its investment in technologies like Corporate Traveller’s YOUR.CT.

Corporate Traveller is one of seven corporate brands currently in Flight Centre’s portfolio. Its other major travel management company (TMC), FCM Travel Solutions, recently won the 2018 award for best TMC making over £200m in sales annually at the Travel Business Awards. Corporate Traveller caters to a segment of business travellers with a smaller annual spend – just between £50k and £2m annually.

As a TMC, Corporate Traveller services the travel needs of its clients through mobile access, personalised travel assistants and 24 hour service. Essential to its success is its digital access. YOUR.CT appears to be replacing Corporate Traveller’s existing digital platform, VeloCT. Early release information indicates that the new platform will allow its clients to create reports directly from the app and manage multiple profiles at once – a key feature for a business with multiple employees travelling throughout the year.

The success of YOUR.CT will depend on how comprehensively Corporate Traveller’s needs assessment has been and how usable the platform will be. Rather than reacting to its competitors offerings, if Corporate Traveller wants to truly consolidate the corporate travel model they will have to anticipate the needs of travel managers which may or may not require TMC services all in one place. It is entirely possible that the travellers using YOUR.CT will have no need for all of its features, while its client managers may be perfectly happy to access additional system needs through sister platforms (see the American Express Global Business Travel offerings, for example). This is to say nothing of how future software updates to individual features will impact the entire platform.

It’s logical that Corporate Traveller would want to consolidate all the features corporate travel managers need into one app, but whether or not YOUR.CT will be a ‘simple and single access point to all your travel needs’ is yet to be seen. Full demonstrations of its abilities will be available when it launches at the Business Travel Show in London on 21 February.