Decision Hacking

A quick example: labelling technique. Assign a characteristic as a label to someone and then make a request in alignment with the characteristic. Alice Tybout and Richard Yalch studied how this could be used to increase voter turn-out. Pre-election day surveys were used to categorise people as “above average citizens”, thus likely to vote. Guess what, after hearing their results, the test subjects did just that: they voted!.

In business travel the decisions employees take during the booking process are highly impactful. Typically, for any given route, the price difference between the cheapest and the most expensive tickets is from double to five times the cost.

Let’s think a bit more about the moment when the spend happens. We are used to thinking about the total yearly travel budget or average tickets prices, etc. But in reality the spend happens when our employees, sitting at their desks in front of a booking tool or on the phone to an agent, assess their choices and make a decision.

And it happens hundreds of times a day. Rita, Sue or Bob will consider (with a varying degree of conscientiousness) the options and, finally, press the button.

If the travel manager was sitting next to an employee during this “point of sale” moment she would undoubtedly enter into a conversation about where they are going and why. They could discuss what the options are for rail vs. air or restricted vs. flexible flights, whether to book the same kind of ticket both ways or to come back in a different class. The travel manager could use the opportunity to point out similar but cheaper fares that the employee could take without any real inconvenience but at some considerable saving to the company.

Such direct influence is effective but can’t, of course, be replicated across the hundreds of moments each day when it would be useful. Travel managers may try to be everywhere at once but true omnipotence is a challenge, even for them. So, what to do? Enter todays advanced self-booking tool technologies.

With some thoughtful configuration, a travel manager can still be “virtually” there, influencing the travellers in the following ways:

Dynamic Policies

Rather than set a “business class over X hours” style of policy, the travel manager can ask the application to look for particular “reference fares”. These might be your negotiated rate or maybe, on some routes, the cheapest flexible economy on BA. Whatever the manager chooses the traveller is only shown compliant options lower or within a percentage tolerance of this fare – as it is priced on the day. So if a supplier has a great offer on a normally expensive fare, the traveller has the flexibility to take it without breaking the official policy. At the same time, the travel manager can have confidence that whatever the traveller is booking, it’s at a competitive rate based on the day’s prices.

Visual Guilt

Part 2 of this process is visual guilt. Once a traveller has selected a fare they like, but before they book it, the tool can point out other options that they did not take. This is similar to the kind of sequential “What about…” questions that a Travel manger may ask.

• What about this cheaper EasyJet fare leaving at around the same time?
• What about taking the same BA flight but 1 hour earlier for a cheaper price?
• What about taking this more restricted ticket, on the same plane, and saving over half the cost?

By replicating the expert interaction with the travel manager, the traveller is forced to think harder, and in the way that the travel manager would wish, about the booking they are making.

With these options, the travel manager has the start of a powerful toolkit to influence the hundreds of buying decisions happening each days, to guide their travellers behaviour to find fare options which get the employees to their meetings but also represent good value to the business.