Traveler Personas and the Traveler Experience: The Next Big Thing in Business Travel with Acquis

The traveler journey, traveler personas, and providing an optimized traveler experience…these haven’t historically been areas of focus for many businesses — especially during times of economic hardship where cost containment is often priority number one — but according to Hansini Sharma, who leads the Travel Practice at Acquis Consulting Group, they certainly should be.

“When I think about these personas and how we build programs, I think we want to think about how to build them without creating additional friction. How can we be creative in leveraging the tools that we have? How can we leverage our online booking tool solution to provide the maximum number of options to our travelers? When you give someone just a little bit of wiggle room, the likelihood of them adhering to the new policy or the new update is exponentially higher…”

In this episode of the SAP Concur Conversations podcast, Hansini discusses how and why travel managers and business leaders should change the way they approach their travel programs and policies to reflect the expectations of their travelers, and explains why she believes the traveler experience is “the next big thing” in corporate business travel.

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Read the transcript from this episode of the SAP Concur Conversations podcast below:

Jeanne Dion:

Welcome to the SAP Concur Conversations podcast. Each episode we sit down with industry experts, visionaries, and leaders, as they share what it takes to build forward-thinking spend programs. Our goal is to get you thinking differently about how your organization spends money. I'm your host, Jeanne Dion. I'm the vice president of the Value Experience Team here at SAP Concur. My team works with our customers to bring positive business outcomes based on data-driven insights. And today I am joined by Hansini Sharma of Acquis Consulting Group, and we are going to talk about all things business travel. From how businesses should change the way they think about their travel programs and policies, to how business leaders can balance the traveler experience against other often competing business priorities. Hansini, we've got a lot to cover in a really short period of time, but before we jump in, could you please give a moment and introduce yourself to our listeners?

Hansini Sharma:

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, Jeanne, for having me today. My name is Hansini Sharma, as Jeanne already mentioned, and I'm the practice lead for corporate travel at Acquis Consulting Group. I myself am a huge travel enthusiast and a very, very frequent business traveler. We're recording this podcast on May 15th, and I think I've flown almost 40,000 miles just this year. Not mileage the qualifying miles, but physical distance, which I think is important to note the difference. I love this topic because I think I've seen so many changes at airports, hotels, expense reports, things like that. Excited to jump in and talk about it.

Jeanne Dion:

Yeah, I am not as prolific a traveler as you, but it's starting to pick up again. I've had two international flights in less than three weeks to two different locations, and I'm noticing a lot about what you're talking about. In my most recent flight, I actually got called to the desk at the gate to ask if I would swap seats with someone, and I was really taken aback because of course I had a middle seat at the time and I said, "They want my middle seat?" And it was because the family was broken up, they couldn't get seats together. They took whatever they could get, and then they were just asking people throughout the flight, "Could somebody switch with this person?" I'm seeing a lot of crowds. I'm knowing that travel is back, both business and personal, but I'm curious from you, what changes are you noticing in airports? Because I'm noticing a lot of changes.

Hansini Sharma:

Oh my gosh, I feel like traveling these days is like playing travel Hunger Games, if you've read the books or seen the movies. And I don't think it's necessary, that has a negative connotation, but I don't necessarily think it's bad. Personally, I love that airports are full again. It's a sign of so many positive things. I love that. I mean, even the economy aside, I love that. We're seeing more children and families traveling, I think it's just a wonderful experience. From a business travel perspective, I think it's gotten a little bit more challenging. I was on a trip a couple of weeks ago and I had a layover in Salt Lake City. And it took me 30 minutes to get into the lounge because the line was so long, but everywhere was packed. Even if I wanted to just grab a snack, it was early because I had a connecting flight from Palm Springs very early in the morning, but the bagel place was packed.

I could have picked something up, but there was nowhere for me to sit. In my mind I was like, "Well, I guess I should just wait here because my layover was three and a half hours." I was at JFK last week, and the line to get into the lounge must have been 70 people deep. But I'm seeing it even on flights. You're seeing fully business women and men and people dressed in complete business clothes trying to work at their tiny little seats, which I think in years past, they were typically in first class or premium economy or whatever class of service on your airline of choice. There's certainly a significant change in volume of travelers and just how we're making it work.

Jeanne Dion:

I think you're right. I've noticed the same thing too, right? I've noticed every time that I go into a club, all the business section is taken up. There's very few places to sit or even plug anything in because there are so many people. They have the privileges based on credit cards or they've bought a day pass or whatever it happens to be. And there's been a couple of times where I've actually found it's been quieter and more peaceful at the gate to get my work done. I don't necessarily like to do it there because it's out in the wide open and I don't want anybody to see what I'm working on, but it's still starting to show that way. And when I think about this from a business perspective, how are travel managers hitting this type of problem now? Are they paying attention to it? Do we even know if they're aware of what's happening for their business travelers?

Hansini Sharma:

Yeah, I think that's a great question. And I think a lot of the conversations I've had are about bringing all the pieces together. Because that's truly what a traveler experience is. Considering all pieces of this journey you're going on. From the point in time where you decide, "Hey, I need to go on this trip," all the way through to when you're reimbursed or your corporate card is paid off for the expenses on the trip. And I'll answer this in a roundabout way, but a number of years ago I used to be a sourcing consultant for a company. And one of the things that we would always look for when we were doing RFPs or even doing onsite visits, I love that you brought up outlets.

But it was such a big thing in 2015 where when you went to a hotel, there had to be an outlet next to the bed and it was very specific, but not a lot of hotels had it. And so if they didn't have it, they were immediately thrown out of the process. And I take that detail because we would be so mindful in the hotel RFP process about this aspect of an experience. I mean, we would move mountains to make sure that happened. But right now I think travel managers are catching up to understanding how to capture these level of details in every aspect of the traveler experience, while also maintaining compliance, cost control, and just the general meeting, the KPIs they have to. In many ways a lot of the questions that I'm asking people and also the conversations I'm forcing people to have are like, "What are the goals of this trip? And how do you want someone to experience this trip? Is it having the most cost-effective trip? Is it having the most productive trip? Is it having the most convenient trip?"

Because those can all be different things. And so we're encouraging travel managers to think through what's most important to them, and then that way you're able to prioritize. Speaking specifically to the airport experience. A lot of what we've talked about is does it make sense to buy lounge passes that you give to frequent travelers, especially if they have a layover longer than three hours. Doesn't make sense to add that into your expense policy, but it's okay to do that if your layover is X amount of minutes or you arrive very early and your meeting is not until 4:00 p.m. but you've landed in Atlanta at 10:30 a.m. You're better off sitting in the lounge and maybe taking a shower there and then waiting and then taking your car to your business location. But we're trying to figure out how to categorize different types of travelers to enable us to think through what makes most sense for their trip.

Jeanne Dion:

Yeah, so I'm glad you brought that up. Would you mind delving a little bit into the travel persona way of travel manager identifying who their travelers are, and how to best service that particular person within their organization?

Hansini Sharma:

Yeah, absolutely. This is one of my favorite topics, and I think it's so interesting. Because a persona essentially, it's like an avatar. When you create a little bitmoji on your phone and you decide with your hair and your glasses and all of that, I look at it very similarly. There are many personas in travel, but there's three that I always think about. One is the new entrant to travel. Typically, our youngest workers, the newest recent college grads, millennials, gen Z, things like that, they typically are bleisure travelers. They care a lot less about where they're staying. Their loyalties are less important to them in terms of hotels and airline affiliations. Because they just want to get where they need to get and they want to be able to see their friends on the weekend or take advantage of this beautiful city that they've had the opportunity to travel to. And that's one type of persona.

There's another type of persona where they are, I call them the space cadet, if you will. They're just unaware of what's available to them. It's not that they're trying to be non-compliant or they're trying to do things wrong, they're just lost, and it happens. And then you tell them to do it and they're like, "Oh, I didn't know that." It's frustrating for a travel manager because they've probably received no less than 3,000 emails about this topic. But a little bit out to lunch, a little in outer space.

And then the third one, I like to call the pirate who, I guess I shouldn't go on record saying this, but here we are. I'm definitely the pirate where I'm like, "I'm just going to book whatever makes sense for me. I need to be here, then I'm going to go here. And then we're just going to figure it out afterwards."

Jeanne Dion:

Yeah.

Hansini Sharma:

Don't be like me. That's bad. There are many like me that exist.

Jeanne Dion:

Yeah, I was going to say, you're a frequent traveler. You know what you like. You're doing this so often. The number of miles that you've put in so far this year in five months is really astonishing. Why wouldn't you be a pirate in that sense? Why wouldn't you take the ability to travel the way that you need to travel in order to accommodate your yourself? Because there's a lot of travel happening for you and you're putting yourself out there. I don't want to say it's an inconvenience, it's part of work, but it also bleeds into your personal life in a really great way.

Hansini Sharma:

I think you hit the nail on the head here. Because your original question is, how do travel managers think about this. I think it's about building a program that might not be as traditional as we've looked at in the past. There is a way to build programs where you're offering multiple options to your travelers. At the end of the day I think that it's really important to travel managers to know where their travelers are, that they are making cost-effective decisions, maybe not the cheapest. I think it's important, it's an important but subtle nuance, and that they're able to be productive and effective on their trips. I think the ROI of travel, and we don't have enough time to get into that today, but it's something that's so topical at the moment and we're constantly discussing, "Was this trip worth it?" But I don't know that we're ever going to figure that out until we build programs where people feel comfortable and empowered to book travel they want to do without being non-compliant.

When I think about these personas and how we build programs, I think we want to think about how to build them without creating additional friction. It's to reduce friction. How can we be creative in leveraging the tools that we have? How can we leverage our online booking tool solution to provide the maximum number of options to our travelers? Perhaps we need to revisit our travel policy to say, maybe you don't need to have such restrictive conditions where someone's going off the deep end and booking direct with the airline, rather than just showing all of the options available to them through the booking tool. Or maybe we loosen limits on expense reports a little bit. I can't remember what I read the other day, but it was basically showing, it wasn't directly related to travel and expense, but it was about cognitive decision making. Where when you give someone just a little bit of wiggle room, the likelihood of them adhering to the new policy or the new update is exponentially higher than just saying you just rejecting outright that they can't go over a certain amount.

If you apply that to travel, if you say you have a $50 limit and we will never reimburse you for over $50, versus saying, "You know what? Let's say up to 70, let's do up to 70." You have some wiggle room, people will more frequently be compliant to that. I think if we can continue to think through and learn about how travelers are traveling, these bleisure travelers, for example. How can we enable them to book multi trip stops, or multi-stop trips in a way that they can have their bleisure experience but still use all the tools? How do we collect feedback after a trip? Is it an email? Probably not. No one's going to answer an extra email, but maybe we're watching the steps leveraging some of these amazing digital technologies that we have available to us, so we can understand how people are interacting with the solutions that we're enabling. And all of that fits into building out these personas and building a more comprehensive program that can achieve both goals on both sides.

Jeanne Dion:

And when you talk about these programs and getting this information, I know a lot of times people are concerned with data privacy. And being too nosy, for lack of a better term. Where does this type of collection of data fit into a GDPR policy? Knowing what I like and what I want and almost reading my mind about it, how does that fit? Where does this fit in the entire business world?

Hansini Sharma:

I love this question, because I think it's such an important conversation to have. I'm going to answer the question within an analogy. When I went to grad school or business school at NYU and one of the classes I took was this advanced strategy course. And in the course we had to pick a company and just understand everything about it. How has it been profitable? It had to be a profit positive company for at least eight years at that point or something like that. Just based on okay, obviously they're doing something right.

My team chose the company Inditex, which most people would probably know as the parent company to the store ZARA among a number of other stores. ZARA is a fast fashion company and they produce the highest number of articles, unique design clothing out of any store in the world ever in the history of fashion by almost three and a half times. So, ZARA on average produces about 10 to 11,000 unique designs of clothing each year. And in second place is H&M, which is around 2,500 to 3,000. The reason I bring this up is because ZARA actually creates a lot of their designs and funnels through their designs because of data collected in stores from their shoppers. Their people are actually trained to collect data points and information on the happenings in their store. The way that they do that, and maybe the next time you walk into a ZARA, just be aware of how things are set up, how things are folded. I mean, every little thing counts, the way the shoes are facing, the way the bags are labeled.

Jeanne Dion:

Yeah.

Hansini Sharma:

They'll count how many times something has been ruffled through. Obviously they have the hard data of which products have been purchased the most frequently, which have been asked about. The sales associates are also trained to watch people in the store. To see where are they spending the most amount of time, where are they not, which section was most messed up, which one was most messed up? Who sold the most stuff? Which sizes were sold most frequently? What's interesting about that is, none of that is personal information. There's no name, there's no age, there's no gender, there's no credit card, there's no nothing.

Jeanne Dion:

Right.

Hansini Sharma:

Every piece of data they've collected has been from observation and things that have been physically touched in their store. When I think about travel and extrapolate that back to customer experience, there are ways that you can collect that type of data. There are software solutions where you can track how people are moving on a website.

Many companies engage this or employ these types of technologies because essentially what they do is they understand where the jump off point is on their page. Where are they getting confused? We can do that with our solutions. Its non-invasive, there's nothing invasive about your personal information. It doesn't record anything. It's purely just seeing what your habits are. There are ways that you can implement surveys in subtle ways throughout a type of journey. There's also multiple ways to collect feedback at every point on a trip. If you have phone-based application, you can integrate certain widgets and things like that to just ask you, "How's this going for you today?" Or it's checking to see how much time, a time in motion study is an incredibly powerful tool.

When you're thinking about all of these data points that you can collect, I mean the list is never ending. I think what I'd encourage travel professionals to do, is to be more creative. You don't need to know the name of the person to know what their preferences are. You can figure out their persona based on how they're behaving on the tools that they're using. I think there's a lot of ways to do that. I'm sorry it was a very long-winded answer, but I think the ZARA analogy actually makes a lot of sense.

Jeanne Dion:

It does, and I think about that. If you look at the way that I travel, I live in a city where the airport is not necessarily good for nonstop flights. And I know that every time that I go to look for international flights, I will actually drive to another international airport that has more options for me. And what I've been noticing lately is that as I start to do that and as I start to look at those things, my search patterns are changing. And so it's something that my travel manager could probably run some data on and say, "She's really traveling outside of Charlotte more than she is of Charleston. And so maybe we should be pushing more of those Charlotte trips and maybe we should be giving her a couple more things that happen in the Charlotte area to push her to there because the flights are cheaper or they're nonstops that we see that she's doing and it saves us for sustainability."

And there's so many different things that it hits on that it might actually be a great way for them to use the data that's in the system to show exactly how I travel. Because you'd be able to see a record of that. You'd be able to tell my persona pretty darn quick.

Hansini Sharma:

Oh my gosh. I mean, there's also so many organizations out there now that use predictive analytics and artificial intelligence to determine how you fly. I think it's a controversial topic, but I'm a huge believer in that more and more will be blockchain enabled in the future. I think travel is the perfect market for something like that for many of the reasons we're talking about today. But I do see a world in which business travelers can go onto an AI bot and say, "Hey, I need to travel. My name is Hansini Sharma. I need to travel for business on Tuesday, May 16th to Chicago for two nights. Send me my itinerary, please. I want to fly this airline and I need to stay in a Marriott hotel."

And I feel very confident that in the short term we're probably going to have a solution where within 10 minutes I have a fully booked itinerary in my email. And all I had to do was just type in where I was going and how. I'm sure I would be on my airline of choice. I would be sitting in a window seat, because I'm a window seat person as close to the front of the plane as possible. I'm a crazy person, so I travel first flight out as frequently as possible, no matter how early it is. I'm sure all of those things, which I won't have to tell this artificial intelligence bought any of these things, because they'll just have all that information.

Jeanne Dion:

Yeah. Well, it's funny. Some of that is available now, when I book my flights, my Concur knows that I like an aisle seat. I do like it at the front of the plane. There's all different preferences that I prefer, a low sodium meal, all those kind of things. It's really nice to have those preferences I prefer that I really enjoy. I think you're right, that is coming. There is one thing though that we haven't talked about. We've danced around it, but I think about travel as a retention strategy or a benefit. As we're talking about these personas and getting a better idea of who our travelers are, how they like to travel, what they're traveling to and from, I think this becomes a huge piece of recruitment and retention. And I don't think it's something that we've ever thought about as a benefit, until now. Have you been seeing this trend within organizations, done any research around that?

Hansini Sharma:

I have done research around this and I think it's actually shifted pretty significantly in just the last couple of years. At a Concur Fusion in 2021, I talked about this topic, largely around the great resignation at that time. I'm sorry, not 2021, 2022. And the point that we were making in 2022, early in the year, leveraging data from the prior two years was actually the opposite, where travel was actually a reason that people were resigning because of the hesitation and the concern around travel and the idea that they had more recently been able to relocate to places closer to family, maybe out of big cities. The flexibility of working from home at that point had finally set into being a good thing as things were reopening and we were kind of emerging from some of the darkest times of that period.

Now I'm seeing a flip because of the way companies operate. A lot of companies are either fully remote or they have some type of hybrid, but what I'm seeing more and more of, and Ralph Colunga actually cited this in one of the articles he recently published for Concur about how a lot of the newer generations like the idea of being able to work wherever they are and have flexibility, but they want the optionality of being able to travel into their home office, or to meeting their colleagues a few times a year. This all hands concept, these annual meeting concepts are becoming much bigger and bigger and bigger. And I mean, Concur has a number of very cool solutions to plan these types of meetings very easily. And you're seeing that become more and more prevalent. I'm talking about these solutions with my customers frequently to enable this type of in-person interaction.

I'm seeing it more and more. I actually, I have a younger cousin, she's 25, she lives in Seattle. She currently works for a massive software company as a software engineer. And she's looking for another job right now. And the reason that she's looking for another job is because she doesn't get to travel on her current one. Yeah, she has a bunch of friends who work for these really cool startups and FinTech organizations and other technology companies, and they'll get stipends to do a week in some cool location. They'll get $1,000, for example, to go work in Hawaii. Just to have a little bit of a mental break, but also that they're encouraging you to get out and do something different. These are tangible, and these are big companies. And some of them are small too, startups that are allocating very limited funds to this type of mentality.

So absolutely, I think it's become a point of retention. And I also love why. I think that we're learning a different way of collaborating with people. And I think it's in just a much more human way, which is like we need to have our space and we need to be able to live our lives in the way we want them, but work is still work and we spend a lot of time with our colleagues. And it's nice to see that we're finding ways to encourage and enable this type of collaboration and to build community in a way that's maybe not what we thought of or grew up with traditionally, but is now becoming a new way of living and working.

Jeanne Dion:

I love that. I like that idea of this stipend and having people work from wherever they want. And it does become an enormous tool for retention as your cousin is clearly showing. I know from my daughter it's a big thing, the ability to travel and see friends and do some leisure travel. Because when you think about having to replace somebody, if they're leaving because of those type of restrictions that you're talking about somewhere around maybe 50 to 60% of that person's salary being the replacement cost.

Sometimes those overall costs around it, not just replacing that person, but then the disruption that it causes to your organization, the retraining, the amount of time that it takes to get them up and running and get them into a sweet spot of productivity, now you're talking closer to 90 to a 100 to even 150% of what that person is actually making in lost revenue in time across all people. So, it becomes a huge way of keeping somebody happy for what may seem like a princely sum of money to begin with. But when you start to add in all the benefits and the salaries and everything else, it's actually a minimal cost for a company to keep somebody happy that way.

Hansini Sharma:

It is. And I think this also goes back to what we were talking about earlier, it's understanding who your travelers are. I mean, I know we're on a podcast and it's difficult to ... You can't see a picture, but something that I've been trying to visually express to people is for decades we've looked at the traveler journey in a linear way. There's your pre-trip, on trip, post-trip, and I mean, how many times have you heard a solution described that way? If I had a dollar for every time, I'd have a very expensive shoe collection, but it's not linear. In fact, it looks like Pollock painting, stuff splattered all over the place. And it's just, it's different. And that's okay. That doesn't make it bad, it just makes it what it is. And I think that we've tried to fit a square peg in a round hole, and that's probably where a lot of our challenges with compliance and leakage and complaints about solutions have come into play over the years.

But the reality of the situation is that if we can be more understanding and now leverage some of these new age technologies to understand what people really want, we can do exactly that, which is what you're saying is avoid some of these, not just cost, but is it worth losing a really high potential valuable employee because they want to travel a little bit more? I mean, I look at my cousin and she graduated top of her class from a university in software engineering with honors. She's been an all-star performer and she wants to leave because she can't travel as frequently for her job. Or she feels like she can't go spend two weeks in Hawaii with all of her friends when they rented a house and decided to, "I'll just work there." Because she has to go into the office once a week to work in an office by herself, because they don't even work in the same room.

And so things like that seem so shortsighted to me. I understand there's a lot of business decisions around it, but I think we need to just be spending more time on understanding these personas. I also think that, this is a conversation I have with travel managers frequently. A lot of the pushback I get when we talk about things like this is that no one's really listening to me. They're only concerned about the bottom line of travel. They're so concerned about the bad experience they had calling the agency to get a change on their flight. And it's very narrow-minded, not because they're not understanding, but because people, travel is very personal. I think it's difficult. When your P2P system breaks, no one's taking that personally. They're like, "We need to figure out a better solution." When your flight is delayed, you think that you're the only person that it's happening to because you're experiencing it in a very personal way.

And I think that we just need to be a little bit more mindful of how we are articulating this to broader parts of the organization. And I think this is such a cool opportunity for travel managers to take this incredibly valuable data and information they have on our people who are the most valuable asset to any organization, and say, "Hey, this is what our people want. This is how they're expressing it. How can we work together to make our organization better? What are things that we can do operationally, financially, just tactically to make this a better place to work?" Especially in a job market like this where it's so competitive. This is a very unique opportunity to level up a role as a travel manager as well.

Jeanne Dion:

This ties back to that idea of the different travel personas you were mentioning that you were a pirate. I would argue that you're not necessarily a pirate, you're just trying to humanize your travel. Travel is so definitively personal. I think in some cases it's even more personal than how much you make. It affects every part of your life. It affects every part of you. And so what you're really trying to do is to humanize travel, not necessarily through the personalization. You're not trying to buck any trends within the organization. You're not trying to flaunt any policies. You are just trying to live as a human. You're no longer a statistics that's just moving through the airport. You're a person who is having to do something on behalf of someone else.

And I think that's where we come down on this travel process and the way that we're traveling now. We have to start to remember, we're no longer just numbers moving through an airport. We're no longer just numbers sitting there waiting after our flight has been canceled and there's no other flights. And we're desperate to try to find an airport hotel that will take us for the overnight so we can get into that next flight the next day. We're just people trying to do the best that we can.

Hansini Sharma:

I agree. The one thing I will say to anybody listening to this podcast is, just remember when your flight gets canceled or there is a delay, whoever you're reaching out to or asking for help, it is not their fault this happened, so please be nice. I would say the worst of people at airports, I think it's everybody's manners just get checked at the door. I'm not sure what happens, and a flight gets canceled. And my friends often joke, they're like, "You're not that relaxed of a person in general, but you're such a relaxed traveler. It's so much fun to travel with you." And I always tell them, I'm like, "It's because nobody in this airport, unless they're actively being rude to you, has any control about what's about to happen on this flight."

Hotels I think are a little bit different. But once you step in, the gate agent, if the pilot timed out, that is not their fault. They are just doing their best, so you screaming at them about not having an update is not going to help. Your flight's delayed for three hours because a part broke, wouldn't you rather be on the ground still? I would. I think it's really important to remember that side of it too, that, I mean, I've just, I'm sure Jeanne, you've seen some stuff. And I just look at that, look up and I'm like, "We just all, as my mom says, just eat a banana and take a walk and try again."

Jeanne Dion:

I take the walk, I don't eat the banana. But I take the walk and I go down to the nearest coffee shop in the airport and I just buy a slew of coffee drinks, and then I head back to the gate and I hand them out to the people behind the counter, because they are probably having an awful day. And it makes me feel better to make them feel better, even though I'm sitting in this airport trying to get somewhere desperately. You're right. For me it's a wellness thing and a mental health thing for myself to do that. I know it affects other people, but it just makes me feel better that I could help them feel better, because they don't have any control over that situation.

And I think about that a lot, that the mental health of our travelers, especially our business travelers with many of the things you're talking about, flights are delayed because the crew is timed out. We've got weather, we've got all sorts of craziness happening. We've got storms, we've got whatever it happens to be. And we're not always well-equipped within the policy to help with that wellness of a person who's stranded at an airport. It would be nice to be able to get a massage at the airport when you're having to wait because your flight has been delayed for four and a half hours, but that isn't covered by the policy. Those kind of things, again, going back in, it really makes a difference for your travelers to help them stay well on the road as well.

Hansini Sharma:

Yeah, I mean, there's so many, and we didn't even get into this, the wellness options available to us. I think it's really cool what we're seeing on a number of airplanes since we've talked a lot about air travel in particular today, I've noticed on, I'm loyal to one particular airline and they recently introduced a partnership with Peloton. And so in flight you can do breathing exercises or short meditation exercises from your head back entertainment. And I did a couple and I was like, "This is actually really cool." One of them was a breathing exercise and the other was a mini workout. I'm more of a Barry's gal, so I like the boot camp, so this workout wasn't quite doing it for me, but it was still very cool. Something to stretch a little bit without being disruptive to my neighbor.

I've noticed that the options at airports in general have become slightly healthier. I'm based in New York City, so I fly in and out of JFK a lot, and there's salad vending machines now. And even in the lounges or at the restaurants I'm finding so many more options of being able to take care of myself if I choose to do so. I'm more of a Shake Shack and couple glasses of wine gal, but-

Jeanne Dion:

Well, Minnie deserves that now. And again,

Hansini Sharma:

If I were a green juice and salad person, there are multiple options available to me, which I don't think there were in the past. Not in the same quantity.

Jeanne Dion:

There weren't, there weren't. But everything in moderation. A Shake Shack and a couple of glasses of wine is really fine, as long as on the other end you pick up a couple of pieces of fruit and maybe a handful of nuts.

Hansini Sharma:

And I try to do that, but sometimes there's nothing better than a burger and a chardonnay every now and again. But-

Jeanne Dion:

That's right.

Hansini Sharma:

I do appreciate that just in general as an industry we are making changes and tangible and measurable changes to focus on the wellness part also, because that directly bleeds into everything else we're talking about. It bleeds into productivity. It bleeds into retention. It bleeds into honestly compliance. I think when people are happier with the experience they're having, they're like, "Okay, maybe I don't need to go rogue." It's almost like being insubordinate at points of actively choosing not to use the solutions available to you because you think you can do it better. I think it's very cool that we're doing that, but there's still some ways to go, but.

Jeanne Dion:

Yeah, I know that I could talk to you for a very long time, but we do have to wrap it up. I do want to thank you very much for your time today, Hansini. This has been really an exciting conversation for me anyway, and I hope at some point you'll come back and we can talk a little bit more about the things we didn't get to cover.

Hansini Sharma:

I will come back anytime and chat with, Jeanne. Thank you, this is so fun.

Jeanne Dion:

Yeah. Well, and thank you all for listening as well to this episode of the SAP Concur Conversations Podcast. To hear more exclusive insights and interviews from the world of business travel, expense, and invoice processing, please be sure to subscribe and listen wherever you find your podcasts. And join us again for our next SAP Concur Conversation.

Want to hear more conversations like this one? Check out the SAP Concur Conversations podcast, and be sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts so you never miss an episode.