ECT Upgrades Flight Search, Reporting Features
Expedia Corporate Travel today unveiled a redesigned flight matrix and tools and announced a business intelligence initiative that offers enhanced and integrated reporting and analysis features.
ECT's new flight search capabilities include identifying a connection city, the preferred number of connections, airlines within a frequent-flier alliance and multiple traveler-preferred airlines. The Internet travel management company also added on-demand access to receipts for all online transactions and a screen tool that allows travelers to adjust flight departure times without creating a new search.
The company's new business intelligence platform includes such reporting enhancements as a redesigned interface and tools to generate reports more quickly than ECT's previous capabilities. Travelers and managers can pull full data history from ECT to conduct research and analysis from archived itineraries, travel and booking information.
The technology was designed in-house to directly integrate with ECT's online booking tool to create reports that help travel managers make better business decisions, said Angie Weber, project manager of Expedia Corporate Travel.
Speaking today during the Association of Corporate Travel Executives conference in Atlanta, Expedia Corporate Travel president Cheryl Rosner said, "Business intelligence is one more principle of procurement that is moving into corporate travel programs, although another principle of business intelligence—access to data—is more the key here. With the right focus and tools, intelligence can make you smarter, more strategic and even more valuable to the company's bottom line than you are today."