Jonathan Stowe
The Warrior's Sidearm - An Expert in Travel
Life on the road is synonymous with exhaustion, high stress, and fatigue. Hence the name “Road Warriors”. This project looks into improving business travel by maximizing traveller wellness through research, technology, and design.
Traditional corporate travel programs have maximized cost savings at the expense of traveller wellness. This results in trips that are rushed, inefficient, and stressful on the traveller. Increasing traveller wellness positively impacts the employer with happier employees who in result work harder creating more satisfied customers. After extensive interviews directly with high-frequency business travellers, journey maps were created to expose the pain points involved in a business trip. The areas of most concern were booking, downtime on a trip, and having to deal with delays and cancellations. My research leads me to the ideal partner for this project, SAP Concur. The largest corporate travel platform, I aimed to create a service designed for the modern road warrior.
Insight
Travel is a necessary aspect of many businesses, from meeting clients to closing deals there are several reasons why we travel. Attitudes towards business travel have changed as well, with many in 25-35 age group viewing it as a perk of their job. However, there is a physical cost associated with high-frequency business travel. From trying to stay within the travel policies, to dealing with the effects of jet lag, there are many reasons why business travellers report feeling “burnt out”. This burn out effects the employee, employer, and client.
Idea
A true sidearm, Expert is an app-based travel management platform. Designed to minimize the negative aspects of business travel, to give travellers more time and energy to focus on their job. This is done through maximizing traveller wellness through preference-based booking and local suggestions, by providing contingency planning for the unexpected, and tools for staying connected with your team while abroad.
Impact
Prioritizing traveller wellness has a number of advantages from improving employee satisfaction and reducing turnover, to improving client satisfaction from employees who are not feeling burnt out. The technologies and ideas demonstrated with Expert can be directly applied to leisure travel as well. Targeting a core market of high-frequency millennial (25-35y/o) business travellers will allow the product to reach a tech-focused workforce who are currently using legacy products. Looking towards the future, travel will undergo a shift towards prioritizing traveller safety and comfort. You can expect to see booking travel move beyond a price and time, to personalized preference-based results.
Biography
My biggest inspiration comes from the world around us, I am excited by change and love to be at the forefront. I believe great design has the power to change people’s lives and I am always searching for the entrepreneurial opportunities that it creates. I am fortunate to have spent the past four years developing and exploring new ideas and concepts, about design, people, and business.