Airline data analytics supplier Cirium has developed a new technology suite for carriers to manage corporate travel, which they say will enable airlines to be more flexible in working with corporate customers.
The suite, Nexavia, is designed "to address the current and future requirements of the airlines in the corporate travel arena," including corporate contract management, airline waivers, trip data and flight status information, Cirium chief marketing officer Mike Malik said. It fuses a corporation's ticketing data with other elements including schedule data, fleet data, flight data and fare data available across Cirium's portfolio.
With all of that together, airlines will be better able to "tell those complete stories" of a corporate client's program, Cirium VP of product and emerging business Robyn Grassanovits said.
"We take that corporation's data as a starting point and capture those inevitable changes that come into the picture [with] operational data," she said. "There's also cost avoidance, with our waiver solutions putting that into the picture."
Current tools that airlines use, for example, tend to build a financial picture largely based on ticket costs, according to Grassanovits. Those tools might miss, however, if a company has a large number of change fees or ancillary costs, which ultimately could be better targets in negotiations, she said.
The fleet data, meanwhile, can give airlines a more accurate look at the environmental impact of a corporate travel program, based on emissions data for specific aircraft types, she said.
Nexavia also is designed to make it easier for collaboration with the data, not just across the various departments within an airline but also with an airline's partners in global contracts, according to Grassanovits. Current tools do not support that, she said.
"[Current tools require] doing it manually with email and then merging data, which is prone to a lot of errors," she said.
Cirium worked with both airlines and travel buyers to develop the suite, and it has been under development for a few years, Malik said. One airline, which Cirium did not identify, has been using it since November and providing feedback. Other airlines are lined up to use the next iteration in the next few months, with "a production version that's widely available" out later in the year, he said. It will continue to evolve as more airlines participate, he said.