The Travel and Meetings Society has released online a travel evaluator to help travel managers and travelers determine whether physical travel or a virtual conference is optimal, officials told BTN. 

The free tool, created by the TAMS technology committee, uses branching logic and a series of questions to help guide that decision at a time when some companies are beginning to prepare for a return to business travel.

“We have about 30 questions on the back end, but depending on the user’s journey, they will select no more than 15 in any one path,” said TAMS technology committee co-chair Peter Psaltakis, who is FCM Travel director of technical solutions. “For example, you could click start and the first question across the board is whether your government allows travel to this destination. If yes, you proceed. If no, there’s a dead stop right there.”

The questions, which address considerations including border closures, quarantines, movement restrictions, cost, safety and return on investment, are grouped around six pillars: whether travel would be allowable, desirable, advisable, practical, affordable and sustainable, according to TAMS. The tool will return with one of four suggested outcomes: travel, a videoconference, a suggestion to consider a videoconference over traveling, or a suggestion to conduct more research before deciding.

Psaltakis said the idea for the tool came about when he and his co-chair Karoline Mayr, founder and principal consultant for Get Travel Solutions, polled members in November and put together a list of 10 projects for 2021. 

“Vaccines were just starting to become more of a reality, so we said,’In three to six months, how can we provide something of value to the industry at large to help inspire confidence in getting back on the road?’ ” he said. “This project was borne out of the need to steer people, whether a travel professional or regular traveler or someone in human resources, legal or risk [management], as they will be asking these questions at some point along the way. So we thought, why not create this and try to take the guesswork out of this for them?”

One key decision for the committee was whether to build the tool from scratch or use a pre-existing solution. The team went with quiz maker Interact to create the questionnaire, Psaltakis said. Work started in January, but the continually changing Covid-19 landscape posed further challenges. “Which type of PCR test do you need? Will [a destination] let you in with or without a vaccine? Those are all challenges,” he said. “We are trying to make sure this is still relevant into next year, so it needed to be broad yet specific enough for this to carry over into a year’s time.”

The release comes about a month after TAMS announced a startup incubator program.