HRG plans to make traveler profile and policy data its first area of development in a campaign it has launched to standardize data across the corporate travel management industry. The U.K.-based global travel management company has started work on defining open source data standards that it provisionally intends to release for peer review at a meeting of travel industry technology experts in May.
HRG issued a call last November for standardization to provide better integrity of data for corporate clients and reduce duplication and expense for suppliers, TMCs and other intermediaries
(BTNonline, Nov. 17, 2008). Technology and distribution director Bill Brindle and director of technology product development Paul Saggar told
BTN they have received considerable expressions of interest from suppliers and TMCs on both sides of the Atlantic since issuing their clarion call.
Groupings such as the Open Travel Alliance already have made efforts to define data standards, but, said Saggar, "they don't focus on corporate travel. The first subjects we are kicking around are profile and policy. We are starting with something which has not been tackled at all and where there is no overlap with leisure travel. If you look at what we collect for our client base, there are 20 to 30 pieces of information they want to know, such as project codes and job codes. We all collect those in different ways."
Brindle said HRG will be happy to work with other TMCs, but has not yet decided when it will invite them to collaborate. "We will be holding a meeting around May to unveil our templates," he said. "The idea will be to get the technical framework together. We are looking at whether we should have other TMCs along at that meeting. If there is enough to talk about, it would make sense."
Brindle added that HRG already is working with airlines and hotels as well as global distribution systems on the project, but that it is not yet appropriate to include clients. One concern often expressed about the idea of data standardization is that any set of standards would not be flexible enough to meet the widely varying requirements of different clients. Saggar said he understands the fear but believes it is not justified. "We looked at our top 20 clients, which are usually the most demanding in their data needs, and we are pretty confident we can deliver what they all need," he said. "What clients usually require differently is analysis of the data, not differences in the data itself."