AirPlus International released a survey of 192 travel management professionals in North America and Europe, conducted in April of this year. Their first question seemed a bit ambiguous to me: “Types of travel alternatives implemented by your company in the past six months.” The options were Specialized virtual conferencing technology (such as TelePresence), Web-conferencing technology, and Increased teleconferencing. Here are the results:
It seems to me that the question specifically excludes companies who already had a stable solution in one of these technologies and didn’t have to implement it in the last half year. I also wonder how often the travel management department is aware of what virtual conferencing technologies are in place in various departments and locations in a large enterprise. But even with those doubts, the numbers were awfully high – with web conferencing surprisingly close to classic teleconferencing.
The survey concluded with this question: “Do you feel that remote conferencing is as effective as meeting in person?” Asking that of a travel management professional seems like it could possibly be influenced by conflicts of interest, but more than 70% said “Sometimes” or “Almost Always.”
This begs the question of what constitutes “effective” – which relates to my own survey on the subject. For instance, lead generation and public information dissemination would probably have much higher response figures than for socializing and team building.
For details, you can read the published PDF of the survey results from AirPlus.
