商务旅行服务专业化:国外差旅管理研究述评

Business Travel Service Specialization: A Review of Business Travel Management Overseas

差旅管理作为商务旅行服务专业化的代表,被谋求转型的商务旅行服务商所推崇,而其作为组织有效控制差旅成本的管理手段,也越来越受到企业重视。目前,该领域学术研究涌现出一批杰出成果,但相关概念探析等基础问题尚待解决,这些问题可通过国外差旅管理研究得到一些启发。文章在回顾国外相关文献及报告的基础上,剖析国外差旅管理的发展历程并编制差旅管理发展编年表,深入解读相关概念内涵并对"差旅"进行重新界定,引入差旅生命周期、差旅管理利益相关方等概念来解析差旅管理职能,最后总结国外差旅管理的研究局限并提出研究展望。

Travel management is a type of business travel service specialization that has attracted increasing attention from business travel agencies, enterprises, and governmental departments, each of which sees it as a potentially efficient way to control travel costs. Consistent with this increasing attention from a practical standpoint, travel management as a research field has attracted increasing numbers of scholars. Chinese researchers began to explore this field far later than their overseas counterparts, and the subjects they have addressed are still limited. Their main focus has been on how Chinese business travel agencies can develop this high-added-value service. To the contrary, notable overseas studies are plentiful, far more comprehensive, and date back to the 1990s. Despite this attention overseas, several fundamental problems, such as the analysis and definition of core concepts, have yet to be resolved. Therefore, drawing inspiration from heuristic English literature and industrial reports, the present review is intended to illustrate problems in detail and summarize the features of that research. First, this review summarizes the overseas travel management development process in the form of a timeline. That chronology illustrates the respective background and information technology characteristic of different development stages, and provides a general portrait of this evolution over half a century. The main part of this review is then organized into three aspects： the core concepts of travel management, travel policy, and its specific function. First, the core term, corporate travel, is comprehensively unpacked, and the review identifies the key problem that affects the current definition, which only treats large-sized enterprises as the research object, but excludes small- to medium-sized enterprises, nonprofit organizations, and governmental departments. With this analysis of the definition＇ s disadvantage, the present review proceeds to create a more academically rigorous and practical definition. Such a definition will be helpful for researchers in their focusing on the diversity of travel management for different entities. The importance of travel policy is then briefly illustrated through a few selected studies; the small quantity of this cornerstone field＇s studies indirectly demonstrates how business travel researchers have largely ignored the study of travel management. For the purpose of full analysis of the function of travel management, the present review introduces two concepts： business travel life cycle and travel management stakeholders. In line with the concept of business travel life cycle, travel management＇ s function is classified into three stages, four processes, and 13 specific tasks. Based on the concept of travel management stakeholders, relevant studies, focusing on the purchasing function of travel management, are organized into three parts： the dyadic relationship between companies and suppliers （such as hotels, airlines, and car rental companies）, between companies and intermediaries （such as travel management companies and other agencies）, and the triadic relationship among companies, suppliers, and intermediaries. Finally, the features of current research are summarized into three points： the definition of core concepts, research perspectives, and research subjects. In order to bolster the future development of travel management research, based on the limits of the available literature, this review comes up with four aspects that can improve on the current disadvantages and should warrant greater research attention in the future.