Why Was Early Corporate Travel Software a Nightmare?

Oren Zeev says first-generation corporate travel software, built in the early 2000s, maybe had the control and visibility a chief financial officer wanted, but it was a nightmare for employees who travel. Builders treated the chief financial officer as the customer and ignored the person on the trip. Travelers still had to use the tool because finance ordered them to.

They hated it and went rogue. 50% of the time they found excuses, including that they could not find a flight. When people skip the software half the time, the company loses the control and visibility it thought it had. A bad product fails to deliver what the buyer expected. People started to talk about consumerization of the enterprise maybe 10 or 15 years ago, but the first generation of travel software came before that. Sellers did not think about user experience when they sold to companies 20 or 25 years ago.

The market has changed. The real insight was that the old tools suck, and companies hold little loyalty to a travel solution provider because the software is not too integrated with other critical systems. A superior product is not very hard to switch in. Serving individual travelers is also a huge selling point to the chief financial officer, because it reduces leakage, the amount of travel that never gets captured by the app.