KDS Makes Business Travel More Intelligent

The travel and expense management services of KDS Neo are getting high-tech in the name of efficiency and accuracy. In an announcement made by KDS late last week at its KDS Now Conference, the company revealed sweeping new updates to its T&E tools that make managing business travel expenses more personalized for employees.

KDS Neo already lets business travelers quickly book door-to-door trips and automate the business expense claim process. But with new updates, KDS Neo now offers customizable preferences for travelers that combine with analysis from previous behaviors, the company said.

“As consumers in an interconnected world, we enjoy incredibly intelligent personalized digital solutions and services,” said KDS chief executive Dean Forbes, “so surely we should expect the same from corporate travel and expense management tools.”

New features include Personalized Trip Search, which recognizes individual trip preferences like airline choice and travel times, as well as Content Hub, which aggregates innovative suppliers for travel and lodging outside global distribution systems.

Additionally, KDS Neo is offering Move, a tool that collects data while employees are in the midst of their travel that operates through the Apple Watch or a mobile phone. Move collects information like ETA, other employee traffic, and electronic boarding cards, among other data points.

According to Forbes, the updates allow users to avoid organizing their business trips through multiple apps and services, all while adhering to corporate policy on travel booking.

KDS’s new updates follow the release of its survey that examined the current state of travel and expense management in the U.K. According to its research, expense sheets and other outdated tools are still prominent in the corporate travel world, and it’s costing businesses time and money. Automating data entry was also a key focus of the research, which found that manual reporting increases the risk of data errors.

“Online expense management tools have been making businesses more efficient for the best part of two decades, yet it would appear that most employers still expect employees to fill in old-fashioned spreadsheets or even write out their claims with a pen,” Forbes said in a statement announcing the results of the survey.