Why switch to Lightning for your online travel booking tool?

Every modern travel program needs an online travel booking tool, but they’re not all created equal. While some offer a basic booking function that ticks a box, the overall experience can leave travelers frustrated with slow interfaces, unintuitive workflows, and limited content that even leaves money on the table.

At Corporate Travel Management (CTM), we knew there had to be a better way to improve the travel booking experience and help our clients save money. That’s why we designed Lightning – to bring speed, savings, sustainability, and simplicity to the business travel booking experience.

Gain more hours in a day

Travelers have more to do in their day than book travel, so a tool that is fast and efficient is often desired. Lightning’s user-friendly, modern interface enables travelers to book travel in 90 seconds, with fewer clicks than other booking tools. At-a-glance details that break down each fare type and cabin class, show if it’s refundable, or apply a ticket credit, to give travelers exactly what they need to make the best choice.

Lightning reduces repetitive tasks by letting travel arrangers book up to 9 travelers in one transaction. With paid seat selection and loyalty status recognition at time of booking, Lightning eliminates time going back to an airline’s website, keeping your people in the right booking channel for payment, duty of care, and data reporting.

A frequent challenge with other online travel booking tools and technology is that they can be slow to make updates or add new features. Lightning is an agile product that runs on two-week development cycles that regularly integrate customer feedback into new feature development and customizations. Other TMCs may have to petition for changes in third-party tools, whereas Lightning’s priorities and roadmap are directly driven by our clients. Lightning’s in-app feed shares recent release updates and acts as a direct feedback channel for specific features.

One example is Lightning’s flight sharing feature, which makes planning easier and faster for travel arrangers who need to share flight options before booking. Lightning offers three ways to easily share out flight schedules and fares, saving travel arrangers time and energy, while offering them flexibility and control when planning with colleagues.  

See more savings

Whether it’s time, money, or energy, Lightning is engineered to bring savings to your travel program. With intelligent and inclusive content, including low-cost carriers, you can stop searching around multiple sites to get the best-priced fares. Owning our technology also means lower fees for our clients, since we aren’t reselling other technology that can involve reseller fees from some agencies and technology providers.

Do you struggle with staff going around company policy to book travel that’s non-compliant and over budget? Lightning’s powerful integrated policy settings gently guide travelers on what they can and can’t book, helping to reduce out-of-policy spend without them having to read the travel policy manual. Fare classes or carriers that are outside company policy can still be shown in results if you choose but are unavailable to be booked so travelers know they are seeing everything to make the best choice. Custom messages on Lightning’s home page and shopping results pages also enhance direct communications with travelers for policy or other important information they need before booking.

Keeping track of unused ticket credits before they expire can be tedious, especially for larger companies. Ditch that manually updated spreadsheet and gets organized with Lightning’s unused ticket tracker. Lightning helps keep track of your ticket credits for you, and even automatically applies them to your cart so you never waste a ticket or your budget again.

Make sustainable choices

As more companies track, reduce, or offset their carbon footprint, travelers need to be able to see and understand their options when booking travel. Lightning displays carbon emissions estimates for air, hotel, and car rentals in search results, so your people can instantly see their potential impact and make sustainable choices.

CTM partners with RDC Aviation to share carbon emissions estimates by cabin class in Lightning based on individual aircraft’s age, engine model, fuel efficiency, seating configuration, and even the airline’s investment in sustainable aviation fuel. Car rental search results can be sorted by carbon footprint, based on an average of 160 km driven per day, or filtered to show electric or hybrid vehicles only.

Lightning users will also be able to see SAF scores for all 250+ leading airlines when viewing flight results, alongside other critical flight information used to determine an appropriate choice, such as price, in-policy status, seat availability, granular carbon emissions, and other planned data such as on-time performance. Users can sort results by SAF score, highlighting those airlines with AAA SAF scores first. CTM will also be making the SAF scores available to travel managers upon request who wish to incorporate the data into their preferred airline review and contracting process or airline RFPs.

 

Keep it simple

We know travel booking doesn’t happen in a silo, and that your online travel booking tool needs to play nice with other travel tools in your program. Lightning smoothly integrates with the CTM tech suite, including CTM Portal, CTM Mobile, CTM Approve, and CTM Data Hub reporting, out-of-the-box on day one.

Joel Bailey, Global Chief Technology Officer, North America explains that “CTM’s aim with Lightning is to upgrade the business travel online booking experience, while also helping our clients achieve their travel program goals – whatever they might be. Whether you need a tool with flexibility for customizations to improve communications, a framework for complex policy flows to reduce out-of-policy spending, or seamless back-end integrations with your other travel tools for detailed reporting, Lightning’s power and speed combined with its user-friendly interface make it an invaluable tool for travel program success.”

Any good online booking tool would be incomplete without expert support from travel professionals. Lightning comes with proactive, reliable, and real human support for configuration, maintenance, and changes with a dedicated account manager and online product delivery team based in the United States. And because life happens when you’re away from your desk, it’s important for our customers to make new bookings and modify existing ones on the move. That’s why our app CTM Mobile features mobile booking for air, hotel, and car, powered by Lightning.

Experience Lightning

Whether you’ve never used an online travel booking tool or have been using one for decades, it’s time to explore how much it’s helping or hindering your travel program’s success. If the idea of a fast, intuitive, and powerful online travel booking tool intrigues you, it’s time to check out Lightning and see how it can save you time, money and so much more.