AS emotionally exhausting as dealing with Covid-19 has been, Tobias Ragge, CEO of HRS has still had time to dream of a new and better world of corporate travel which he says has been completely disrupted by the pandemic.

“Entering this stage, travel is completely disrupted,” said Ragge, who took over the reins at the second-generation, family-owned company in March 2008. “It has shown us that while travel is connected, governments are not and our biggest challenge is how to bring the industry back in a safe, coordinated and connected way, with technology and data at the heart of it.”

He is hopeful that September could be the month corporate travel gets back on the road in some shape or other, but he recognises that the challenges over the opening of travel bubbles across the world come down to one thing – a connected and verified personal ID.

“This is such a fundamental crisis but it can bring about a better future if we know how to leverage the changes – for the first time, we can realise the future of digitisation which we have talked about for a long time.”

He sees different players shaping the future, away from the GDS models. “Those monolithic cultures, walled gardens, are a thing of the past. They who don’t own the tech cannot survive.”

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