The quest for transparency in all areas of travel management continues to transform the practice. Unbundled airline fees--the focus of our Cover Story--continue to confound buyers who seek a consistent means to identify, track and leverage spending in this growing space. But short of an industry solution, buyers have tried whatever works to gain a clearer picture of this emerging category.
Beyond airline fees, such buyers as Viacom ( Case Study) have tapped into technology to automate accounting and pre-trip approval for travel expenditures, while Capital One ( Case Study) handcrafted dashboards as the means to garner senior management attention on travel trends.
Other organizations, such as The Scooter Store and United Services Automobile Association (see Leading Practices), have gained insights to improve travel and fleet management by combining data from both business practices. Common for the pioneers of travel management, the practice areas diverged into separate silos in many organizations. Here, the single focus has magnified saving opportunities.
Advancement in automating ground transportation reservations, the focus of Technology, has prompted new investment for one competitor and renewed hope by several others that companies will more tightly manage this spend category to gain much-needed transparency.
Meanwhile, in the practice of meetings management ( Meetings), companies may have gathered meetings data, but continue to grapple with how to use it to measure the performance of their programs. The variances between corporate cultures and even the types of meetings held within the same organization have made it difficult to devise companywide, let alone industrywide metrics by which to measure this space.
Payment and Supply Chain detail other areas that still require travel procurement focus--the fight against fraudand the push to ensure that the increasingly global workforce can use a preferred corporate cardanywhere in the world.