What 40 Years of Technology Have Looked Like for Travel

Ralph Colunga is thought leader for travel and expense technology solutions at SAP. A 40-year veteran of business travel management, his travel buying career has included 13 years at Advanced Micro Devices, eight years at Cisco Systems, four years at Oracle and six years at Salesforce. He moved to the supplier side eight years ago and since then held a number of executive roles at SAP Concur. In 2019, BTN inducted Colunga into the Business Travel Hall of Fame. In 2007, BTN named him Travel Manager of the Year for his program consolidation work at Oracle. BTN in 2004 recognized him as a Best Practitioner during his time at Cisco. Colunga is set to retire this week.

I’m preparing for retirement after spending the past four decades in the business world, most of it in the travel industry. Acknowledging this impending change has resulted in a lot of reflection. 

I still remember my first business trip. I was working at the Hilton Palacio Del Rio in San Antonio, and they sent me to Chicago for sales training and cold calls. Back then, we had to fill out the sales results on 3×6-inch cue cards, in pencil so it could be erased if you made a mistake. There’s nothing like spending hours with the sole responsibility of making cold calls to help you decide whether it is your life’s purpose. (It wasn’t mine.)

In contrast, I took my last business trip in March. It was surprisingly melancholy, knowing this was the last time I would reserve my lodging, hotel, and car via my company’s booking tool. I went to Houston to present at a company event and was sad, but also happy—a feeling that many may relate to—knowing I was going to submit my last expense report. It was far easier than submitting my expenses in 1979, when I had to staple all my receipts to a piece of paper, make a copy for my records, then inter-office mail everything to accounting to review and, if approved, cut and mail a check several weeks later. In fact, a lot has changed in business travel. 

Business Travel Then

About 40 years ago, we had pagers, and we thought they made us very cool. We were amazed by our first facsimile machine at the hotel. It could print at the blinding speed of a page every three minutes on rolled paper that would turn your hands blue from residual ink. 

The travel experience was also vastly different. People used to smoke on planes. Anyone, traveling or not, could walk to a gate. The Transportation Security Administration literally didn’t exist for half of my career. Only after 9/11 and the advent of the TSA did duty of care become crucial for companies. It was no longer nice to have, but rather a must-have taken very seriously by companies.

The first electronic tickets, “e-tickets,” were introduced in 1994 and they were a way for airlines to save money. What’s funny is many people hated them at first; they didn’t feel comfortable traveling without a paper ticket. It’s one of the reasons why it took until 2008 for all IATA-member airlines to achieve 100 percent e-ticketing. 

The following years witnessed rapid advancements in travel: Online booking became available in 1995 by a company called Internet Travel Network. When I worked at Cisco Systems, we were one of the first companies to embrace the digital booking tool. 

From Cisco, to Oracle, I then joined Salesforce in 2008, a big year for the “sharing economy.” It started with a San Francisco startup called Airbnb, and the concept of home sharing was so foreign at the time. But when we learned about Uber in 2009, we were immediately on board with the idea, especially in the Bay Area where taxis were relatively scarce.

Business Travel Now

Going from paper tickets and fax machines to the internet, mobile devices, and then the cloud, and seeing so many of these changes happen in the middle of it all—in Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area—has been a wild ride. 

Today, tech startups continue to transform travel. Artificial intelligence is already at work with smart travel apps using technology to analyze data from millions of customer reviews and provide suggested activities and destinations based on user preferences. It’s the same way that Verify in Concur Expense uses AI and machine learning to analyze decades of expense user data and identify hard-to-detect spend issues and anomalies in audit checks. In the next couple years, we’ll see continued transformation as generative AI enhances the experience, such as travel planning and foreign-language translation.

At the start of my career, I couldn’t have imagined the possibility of biometric technology to identify passengers for security purposes. Or hotels that use Internet of Things sensors to create the smart hotel room, which automates room lighting, temperature and ambiance control. It’s incredible that travelers can visit ancient archaeological ruins and wear augmented reality glasses to superimpose reconstructed images of the original structure. 

The future is always about opportunity. It is an opportunity for travel management experts to lead and go forward with an “innovative mindset.” It will allow travel and expense programs to become more agile by adjusting policies to the current business landscape. It will simplify and automate processes, eliminating friction points and creating an inclusive environment where employees are heard and sentiments are considered.

I’m retiring at a critical time for the business travel industry, and I expect technology’s impact on our industry over the next 15 to 20 years will be as amazing and exciting as it was when we were marveling at pagers and witnessing the evolution of new business models. Indeed, I suspect the technology revolution in business travel will move faster than ever. This time, I’ll be marveling at it from a distance, but the worlds of business travel and technology will only move closer together as they reshape new models and economies. For me, they will always be close to my heart.