It's been said that the travel industry is particularly data-heavy, and that effective travel management and procurement programs need information mastery to simultaneously optimize spending and sufficiently service travelers. Achieving that is an age-old challenge.
"The intersection of super-computing, open-source data platforms and unprecedented levels of data capture provide enormous and affordable opportunities to the people charged with getting more out of corporate travel programs," according to a statement from BCD Travel director of research and intelligence Claudia Unger. "Yet only a fraction of companies have begun to tap the full potential of [business intelligence] to improve travel programs."
Doing so means collecting, understanding and using travel data for benchmarking, tracking and managing ancillary spending for core travel components like air travel and lodging, uncovering savings opportunities in such secondary-spend areas as ground transportation and dining, determining causes, making future predictions and incorporating data from other parts of the enterprise to construct a wider view. Corporate payment systems traditionally have been one of the most-used data sources for travel management pros.
Now, from travel agencies and booking or expense tool providers to data aggregators and specialist firms, several more industry players are developing new tools to help travel buyers tackle those tasks.
Cornerstone Information Systems, for example, now offers the iBank Business Intelligence product, built around the QlikView data analytics engine developed by BI firm Qlik. It includes hundreds of key performance indicators related to savings analysis, policy and program performance, fees, the impact of ticket exchanges, carbon emissions and traveler wear and tear (measured, for example, by the amount of time spent in flight and the number of red-eye and weekend flights taken). It also provides benchmarking, sharing functions, a dynamic "storyboard" option and "connectors" to integrate data feeds from other sources.
"I am doing my best to address the why instead of the what and the how," said Rock Blanco, the Cornerstone Information Systems senior vice president who led the project. "It's about taking the way we manage information and putting it into context."
Though targeted primarily at travel agencies, a new BI tool from commission recovery and reconciliation specialist eCommission Solutions that now is in a pilot can be used to help analyze client travel patterns and policy compliance. "It's big data, but how one manages and digests this information is critical," said ECS founder and CEO Paul Hoffmann. "We have focused on commission recovery, which is very valuable because it's about the money, but we've come to understand that it's not just about the money; it's about the data."
Carlson Wagonlit Travel also is working on BI by rebuilding the architecture behind its Program Management Center. According to senior vice president of global marketing Nick Vournakis, goals include augmenting CWT's vast travel data with several other sources and helping clients better visualize data.
Meanwhile, BCD Travel is working to build out its Decision Source business intelligence platform and in a June white paper asserted that BI "is the backbone of your travel program." But the agency wrote that one big hurdle remains: While there's plenty of data being collected, "there's generally not enough bandwidth for travel managers to take on detailed analysis and analytics of all data available."
Getting Beyond 'Blah-Blah'
Some see other problems. "Today's travel data reporting tools score too low on the value-add dimension," according to Scott Gillespie, co-founder and managing partner of travel data analysis firm tClara, who described as "blah-blah" today's travel data.
"All BI tools will be more valuable when they can answer the 'should' questions: What should this number be? Which option should we choose?" Gillespie said. "Instead, they get stuck answering the 'what' questions: What's my average ticket price? What's my spend trend?"
Aash Shravah, director of corporate sales at California agency Montrose Travel, said the industry has not yet come to the point where technology solutions can provide all the answers. "I don't think they are anywhere where they need to be," he said. "They are moving in that direction. Everyone is trying to do the same thing: We have all this data, let's apply that in a manner such that the user doesn't have to be a scientist to figure it out."
This report originally appeared in the August 2014 edition of Travel Procurement.