Amex GBT Premier
Insights
American Express Global Business Travel launched its Premier
Insights data visualization tool this year. It integrates agency and American
Express corporate card data to give clients a clearer picture of their overall
travel spend.
Premier Insights features a standard set of metrics that
call attention to spend patterns and savings opportunities, and it offers
industry benchmarking against other Amex GBT clients. Users can identify
program leakage and tinker with the tool to see how planned policy changes
might affect travel spend and vendor relationships. Customers also can view
summary reports, dig down to supplier-specific performance information and
examine travel behavior by business unit or individual travelers.
Though the tool integrates only Amex card data, other cards
soon could be possible. Premier Insights operates on a subscription-based
pricing model.
ARC's Corporate BI
Tool & tClara's Air Clarity
ARC, the same company that provides ticketing data to
airlines and travel management companies, this summer launched a corporate
business intelligence tool aimed at getting travel managers better data for
their air spend. "When corporates meet with their airline reps on their
quarterly goals, they have problems with the data because they have one version
of the data coming in through the TMC and the airline guys come in with their
own version," said ARC director of product management Arun Gupta. "Our
main goal is to make travel managers smarter by providing this data
intelligence around air travel."
ARC's Corporate BI tool pulls data from the ARC Compass data
warehouse, which is the basis for all of ARC's data products. "When
[corporates and airline reps] start using the same product, then there's no
question of whose data is right," Gupta said.
The tool features an interactive dashboard that tracks
critical key performance indicators and provides industry benchmarks and
savings insights weekly. Travel managers can use scenario modeling to examine
savings opportunities based on things like policy, vendor or cabin class
changes. Gupta said accessing the data on a weekly basis allows corporates to
correct course before they miss their quarterly goals.
Though Corporate BI uses ARC data, the tool is not limited
to corporate travel departments or organizations with dedicated ARC numbers.
For those without an ARC number, the process is a little more complicated,
requiring travel managers to send ticket numbers to ARC weekly or monthly via a
template. That's something ARC hopes to address in the future, said senior
product manager Colette Cipollini.
TClara's Air Clarity works with ARC data as a separate but
complementary tool. Where Corporate BI is an exploratory tool, slicing and
dicing data, Air Clarity is an explanatory tool, said tClara CEO Scott
Gillespie. Instead of an interactive dashboard, Air Clarity reports come in
PowerPoint or PDF form and answer key questions, including: How good are the
contracts? How is the program changing? Do we need to go to RFP? If we do, what
kind of pricing should I expect?
Corporate BI is available through a tiered,
subscription-based pricing model based on the number of air transactions. Air
Clarity is available for flat fee per quarter of analysis.
Cornerstone Information Systems' TravelOptix
The TravelOptix analytics platform allows customers to bring
in a wide scope of data from a variety of sources and choose how it's
visualized. Cornerstone Information Systems founder and CEO Mat Orrego said the
only limit to the type of data clients can bring in is their own ability to
make sense of it.
To get each client started, Cornerstone conducts a formal
data-acquisition process in which it goes after sources like back-office agency
data, credit card data and GDS data. The company also can incorporate raw data
provided to travel managers by other suppliers, such as Uber. Additionally,
travel managers can integrate miscellaneous data sources like human resources.
For example, a customer could layer HR information on top of sales data on top
of travel data to analyze employee performance or use U.S. Federal Aviation
Administration time delays to measure preferred carrier efficiency. Some
clients also opt to have Cornerstone purge incomplete data at this stage,
Orrego said.
Clients can drag and drop visualization tools to control how
their data is presented. The platform allows customers to track key performance
indicators and formulate scorecards that they can distribute to various stakeholders.
Clients can also track how well their agencies are performing.
TravelOptix has a built-in presentation feature that enables
users to create a visual story to share with stakeholders. The tool is mobile
capable, as well.
Cornerstone charges an initial data-acquisition fee, then a
subscriber fee based on the number of users accessing TravelOptix. There is
also an additional cost to working with Cornerstone's professional services
team.
CWT AnalytIQs
Carlson Wagonlit Travel's AnalytIQs tool is helping users
understand and analyze their consolidated data. The platform's dashboards
provide benchmarking against other CWT clients and recommendations and
solutions to improve travel programs. "We've tried to make sure that we're
addressing all profiles of the types of users that potentially would want to
use the business intelligence and reporting product line," said CWT global
product director Leisha Lindsay.
Last year, the company rolled AnalytIQs out to its entire
client base of about 9,800 customers, following a six-month pilot.
The tool uses CWT agency data and incorporates safety and
security alerts and risk ratings from International SOS, as well as profile
data from CWT Portrait and unused ticket data from CWT Document Bank. CWT also
is integrating its Program Messenger tool, card and expense data and meetings
and events data. "Our objective is to bring all of the products and
services and data that the client needs into one place to be able to manage
their program end to end," Lindsay said.
Though AnalytIQs features a standard set of key performance
indicators, clients also can create new indicators or custom reports, whether
independently or with the assistance of the CWT team.
Lindsay said the reporting and analytics portion of
AnalytIQs is part of the standard offering for CWT clients, while additional
components, like Program Messenger, entail additional costs. The tool is
available in English, French, Spanish, German, Italian and Portuguese, and CWT
will add Mandarin soon.
DVI Vantage Point
DVI Vantage Point is a soon-to-launch tool from Data
Visualization Intelligence, which spun off from Travel and Transport this year.
The tool grabs data from traditional sources—including expense reports,
corporate cards and travel management company data—but also brings in benchmark
data from other sources.
For the benchmarking portion, DVI works with multiple
sources, including the International Air Transport Association, Prism and
global distribution systems for air, plus hotel sources like the Smith Travel
Accommodations Report and Lanyon. "We take data and incorporate it with
our data," said Data Visualization Intelligence general manager Brian
Beard. "It's not just taking data that we've purchased and displaying it
out there; we use it for analytical purposes." Beard said the company also
plans to build APIs to systems like the GDSs, card and expense in order to fill
in gaps in program data.
The mobile-capable Vantage Point tool visualizes a standard
set of key performance indicators around areas like spend, compliance and
traveler behavior. The platform is also customizable to suit a client's
specific visualization, though Beard said DVI would like 80 percent of the KPIs
to remain standard for most of its customer base. "Many of the customers
want to get down to individual traveler accountability," Beard said. "We're
accommodating that. We can actually go all the way down to a traveler level."
The visualization layer is completely configured, which is
to say the company "can change the look and feel of your data very quickly"
without needing a developer to get involved, according to Beard.
Because DVI is a wholly owned subsidiary of T&T, Vantage
Point is available to non-T&T customers. Beard said Vantage Point is
offered through a somewhat flat pricing model "based on complexity and the
amount of work we have to do each month or each week to be able to reconcile
aggregate data." The flat fee includes all functionality and an unlimited
number of users, who can access the tool with individual IDs and passwords or
through a single, companywide sign-on. Data Visualization Intelligence plans to
launch Vantage Point this year.
Omegalytics
Omega World Travel's Omegalytics reporting system became a
differentiator for the travel management company when it launched the platform
last year. The tool allows users to examine air, hotel, car and rail data down
to the individual traveler level. It benchmarks against other Omega clients and
against five similar agencies, thanks to data from ARC, and against the overall
industry, again based on data provided by ARC. "[Omegalytics] provides a
sense of transparency in terms of articulating everything that is happening
within their travel program," said Nadim Hajje, Omega vice president of
information technology and data analytics. "They can see everything in a
very intuitive manner."
Omegalytics' OmegaCare feature lets travel managers view the
U.S. Department of State's live Twitter feed and see where travelers are around
the globe. The tool also allows travel managers to run what-if scenarios as
they consider altering their vendor relationships and travel policies.
In its upcoming iteration, Omegalytics is launching contract
management, which, for instance, will help travel managers see if they're
getting their negotiated rates at preferred properties and will highlight
opportunities to add hotels that travelers are already using.
From a tech standpoint, Omegalytics is mobile capable and
offers an app for iPhones and iPads. The platform has an enhanced feature that
integrates with Microsoft Office, which, Hajje said, travel managers could use
for something like publishing data from the platform into a PowerPoint
presentation and updating the presentation with new data regularly and quickly.
Omega's 15 or so standard data reports are available free to
Omega clients, who also can create their own reports, such as lost travel
savings by department. Licenses for Omegalytics Premium—which includes the
supplier dashboards, benchmarking, duty of care and what-if scenarios—are
available for $85 per user per month for Omega clients.
Hajje said the company also is working with corporate
clients to feed data from clients' other TMCs into Omegalytics, whether the
clients are contracted with Omega or not. In those instances, the pricing model
differs.
Pi Travel
Pi categorizes itself as an intelligence provider that
happens to operate in the travel industry. Its Pi Travel platform is a
data-agnostic, cloud-operated, turnkey solution that allows clients to pull
data from traditional sources like travel management companies, payment cards,
expense and hotel, air and car rental suppliers. The product can also loop in
data from sources outside the travel sphere, automating feeds from customer
relationship management systems and human resources databases.
"Although we look at the traditional stuff like
sourcing angles, the operational angles, the policy compliance, duty of care,"
said Simon Carmouche, director of analytics solutions and product manager for
Pi Travel, "we also go beyond that and start to look at things like
traveler experience, traveler friction, the impact of travel and tying that up
with HR information and staff turnover."
Pi Travel customers can access a library of enterprise
reports that are embedded within the solution, "so there's a base level of
product you get out of the box, " said Pi North America managing director
Tom Tulloch. If a client wants a customized report, "those can be handled
quickly in most cases through a very robust ad hoc development feature."
Tulloch added that the platform is easy to use and requires virtually no
training.
For midmarket buyers, though, the tool is less than perfect.
Tulloch said Pi works exclusively with large enterprises and has found success
with pharmaceutical companies and financial firms. "We're delivering this
intelligence to customers willing to spend the money to have better spend
metrics at their disposal so they can make better decisions about their larger
business," he said. The platform also accommodates nontravel professionals
who are looking to dig into data in their own departments.
Pi charges an initial implementation fee for the basic
product, as well as additional fees for supplemental modules. End-user
licensing allows clients to log in and interact with the software, and
super-user licensing enables greater flexibility around things like
administrative rights and ad hoc opportunities.
Prime Sourcing
Prime Numbers Technology, the travel technology sister
company of Atlas Travel, was among the first industry players to step into the
interactive analytics space. It launched its recent Prime Sourcing suite one slice at
a time starting with Dynamic Analysis in 2014. It followed with Contracting
Monitoring in 2015 and just released its Contract Modeling product in October.
Dynamic Analysis is the largest piece of the technology
suite. It primarily consumes TMC data but can digest other forms of travel
data, along with corporate hierarchy data to facilitate drill-down to business
units, project teams and individual travelers. The platform was custom developed
for flexibility and gives wide berth for unique, user-defined data fields.
Contract Monitoring brings specific contract information
into the suite and with it the ability to track booking volume in relation to
contract commitments and progress toward discount thresholds. Contract details
become part of the overall analytics for deeper insights.
Contract Modeling is the capstone to the suite. It allows
users to compare contract proposals by modeling how different offers match with
a travel program in terms of discounts, market coverage, class-of-service
requirements and available volume to which the corporate can commit based on
historical booking volume. For now, Contract Modeling is available only for air
contracts, but Prime Numbers plans to roll out hotel and car in a future
release.
For corporate end users, the Prime Sourcing suite comes with
unlimited licensing. Prime Numbers has also marketed the technology to travel
management companies, not only to power analytics for clients but also for tracking
and modeling the TMC's own supplier contracts. For TMCs, Prime Numbers also
plans to integrate Prime Sourcing with the point of sale in order to push
real-time contract awareness to agents.
tripBAM Analytics
TripBAM, which has provided advanced hotel data for some
time now, this summer launched an analytics tool that allows travel managers to
access visually detailed reports of their hotel program performance.
"We're bringing a lot more and a lot higher-quality
data to these travel managers that they really haven't had awareness of or
access to in the past," said tripBAM founder and CEO Steve Reynolds. The
platform can get hotel details that are often missing in agency data, such as
the correct rate for a multinight stay, what room type was booked and what type
of rate was booked, he said.
The metrics tripBAM Analytics tracks and measures include
hotel savings by property and region, the weakest properties for negotiated
rates, average nightly savings by brand, whether hotels are honoring last room
availability, what commissions a program should be getting for their bookings,
whether travel programs are receiving a true percentage off the best available
rate discount and how their programs are faring with compliance.
Since the tool launched, tripBAM has added a feature that
measures market share among hotels' competitive sets, which means travel buyers
can provide concrete data to hoteliers when they've shifted market share as a
result of a discount.
With benchmarking data built into the tool, travel buyers
can, down to a property level, view the previous year's average daily rate, the
current average daily rate, the average negotiated rate and the average rate
found by tripBAM's shopping tool.
TripBAM shops hotel rates in more than 50 countries. Clients
can acquire the tripBAM system through their travel agencies or work with
tripBAM and pay per booking or pay a flat monthly fee, which depends on the
client's booking volume and the number of features enabled.
Yapta's FareIQ &
RoomIQ
In September 2016, airfare and hotel price-tracking service
provider Yapta introduced Professional and Premium levels of reporting for
clients that use its FareIQ and RoomIQ Intelligent Price Tracking services.
Professional reporting, part of the company's standard
offering, allows users to view program savings and key performance metrics and
includes access to a savings dashboard and report-summary emails. The airfare
package provides data like negotiated versus publicly available fares, and the
hotel package offers industry benchmarking, realized savings and missed savings
opportunities.
The Premium package for airfare provides greater detail
around negotiated versus public fares, and it highlights trends around pricing
by airline; markets or routes, such as airfare volatility; and class of
service. The Premium hotel package provides specific data by brand and
property, how negotiated rates stack up against public and dynamic rates, the
true price of amenities and how often the company gets last room availability
or the proper discount on best available rate. RoomIQ monitors hotel bookings
across 115 countries, including the United States.
Yapta's FareIQ and RoomIQ prices are based on
the percent savings a client achieves by using the service or on a
per-transaction basis.