Corporate Travel Management expands AI-powered door-to-door trip builder

Small groups and meeting to benefit from the enhancements

Corporate Travel Management (CTM) has announced enhancements to its proprietary AI-powered door-to-door itinerary builder within Lightning, its online booking tool.

What this means is that it can better deliver destination recommendations and personalised travel itineraries for small groups and meeting attendees.  

Those in the know will recognise that sourcing the right destination for a corporate meeting or event can be time-consuming, costly and often challenging when it comes to availability – this can result in significant travel spend leakage.  

Lightning’s new door-to-door trip builder uses AI to create an entire policy compliant trip, including flights, hotels, trains, car rental, airport parking and lounge passes, using just the traveller’s preferred destination. 

CTM is expanding this functionality to allow travel bookers and meetings coordinators to source appropriate venues and book door-to-door itineraries for groups of two to eight travellers. 

Door-to-door+ uses AI to translate a single set of meeting requirements into a range of destination and venue recommendations, and individually tailored door-to-door travel itineraries for each attendee, all in an instant.   

According to CTM’s Chief Technology Officer EMEA, Brian Sheerin, the technology scales excellently for small meetings and team offsites, providing a great selection of options but not overwhelming team leaders who just need to find the best location.

“Business travel is about meeting face-to-face, so when we built the ability to connect an entire trip into one itinerary, we knew there would be huge benefits to scaling that to handle groups,” he said. 

“Planning small team meetings, a sales kick-off or quarterly Board meeting should be fast and flexible, without the time, cost or complexity of a large-scale event or engaging a full meetings management solution. 

“As we build more AI into Lightning, customers are enjoying greater efficiencies and the ability to plan their travel and meetings in new and exciting ways that keep costs down while maximising choice and policy compliance.” 

Lightning’s AI-powered door-to-door trip builder for small groups and meetings is currently in pilot with select CTM customers and is due for general release in the UK this summer.