Seventy-five percent of North American travel buyers surveyed are working with suppliers to get more customized reporting, but more than half of them are not willing to spend more money to get it, according to a new AirPlus International survey.
AirPlus between Feb. 21 and March 12 surveyed 132 corporate travel buyers in North America, Of those, 34 percent reported annual travel spending above $10 million, while 15 percent reported spending above $50 million.
Of all respondents, 43 percent indicated they work with their travel management company on "customized reporting" to get "deeper intelligence" for their programs, while 31 percent of respondents said they were "mandating" traveler use of TMCs for better data, according to AirPlus.
Likewise, 32 percent of respondents indicated they work with their corporate card providers to receive "customized reporting," and 23 percent would "mandate" use of those providers "capture better spend information at the time of purchase," according to the survey.
While many said better reporting is needed, 56 percent of respondents indicated they're not willing to pay more to improve their travel data, the report concluded.
Travel managers "already pay for data as part of the bundled fees charged by suppliers, and paying more for it is out of the question," according to the report. "Should a company consider devoting additional resources, the money spent to improve data would likely need to be returned in clear travel savings—which is a risk."
In efforts to avoid additional fees for better data, 21 percent of those surveyed indicated they would "bring more raw data in-house for internal analysis," according to the survey.
While credit card data was the most widely collected and analyzed source of data by travel buyers (78 percent), data from their travel management companies was identified by 61 percent of respondents as their primary source of data. Credit card data was cited as secondary support data by 58 percent of travel buyers, according to the report.