American Express has introduced enhanced corporate card folio data for car rental transactions, which it claims will give clients in North America and Europe much more comprehensive information on and control over their expenditures.
Andrew Buckley, European vice president for marketing, said Amex now offers level-three line-item data, breaking down the total price into not only the base rental fee but also charges for fuel, insurance, penalties and such miscellaneous items as hire of satellite navigation equipment or vehicle delivery and collection from the client's premises. Non-financial folio data include class of car and the number of rental days.
Buckley said that car rental folio data would help clients improve the ability to check whether travelers have made unauthorized upgrades when collecting their vehicles and whether they are amassing an unwarranted number of penalty charges, such as fines for parking or nonpayment of congestion charges in London and several Scandinavian cities.
American Express' Buckley also cited procurement benefits including checking that suppliers are charging the contracted rate and improved knowledge for negotiations, with buyers better able to put on the table for consideration such extras as insurance and fuel.
"This enables procurement people to negotiate on more than the base commodity," Buckley said.
According to American Express, most cards provide only so-called level-one data for car hire, itemizing little more than name of supplier, rental location and total charge. Amex originally built its car rental folio capability last year in response to a request from a U.S. client with heavy rental usage in Europe.
Initially, it gave the client folio data for rentals with Hertz, Europcar and the German market leader Sixt, subsequently adding National and Avis. Now folio data from Europcar and Sixt are available free to any client that requests the information from Amex. The card company also has the ability to provide data from other rental providers but the client will need to ask the rental provider first.
"In practice, the rental companies would want to do this with their very large clients," according to Buckley, who said that he expects more suppliers to make the data available to American Express without demanding a request.
Buckley said the company would announce a related enhancement for its lodge card product this fall.
Amex senior vice president of the global client group Mark Webb told BTN about the impetus for this effort to produce more detailed car rental spending information
(BTN, May 16, 2005)."Some of the companies that have been using these reports have been seeing out-of-policy refuelling charges at the car rental facility," Webb said. "They're supposed to be paying $49 a day and it comes back at $77 with gas. That insight led us to create car folio reporting."