ACTE Issues Call For Standard Definitions For Data
Corporate travel practitioners are calling for greater standardization in the way vendors and intermediaries provide data to help optimize quality for buyers through a white paper that the Association of Corporate Travel Executives today is issuing at its global conference in Munich.
The white paper, "Data Optimization—Best Practices and Barriers," reveals inadequate standardization among airlines as well as hotels, travel management companies and card providers in the sets of data fields they offer. With no consensus on crucial reporting definitions, buyers receive irreconcilable information from competing suppliers.
Regarding airline data, Scott Gillespie, vice president and general manager of TRX Travel Analytics, called for standardizing:
•Origin & destination (O&D) definitions
•Fair marketshare definitions
•Citypairs associated with each airline's system
•Assignment of a dominant carrier and booking class to an interline journey
•Treatment of refunds, exchanges and voids
He also called for more clarity in reporting on the issues of reporting periods, such as booking, departure, invoice or ticketing, and whether taxes and fees are included in the data.
Each of these issues can generate inaccurate or misleading data for buyers, which is a great source of frustration, according to Jim Lennon, global travel leader for PricewaterhouseCoopers. As an example, he cited finding air segments in his data with no financial value attached to them. "We know we bought the segment, but we don't know how much it cost," he said. "We understand the discrepancy between booked and flown data, but discrepancies between booked and booked data shouldn't happen. We need to get commonality."
Steven Schoen, director of travel management for Siemens Shared Services, said suppliers could do more to eliminate the anomalies causing the problems. "If all the data providers could get together to agree on common data standards, that would be wonderful," he said. "We recognize it is not easy, but we hope our selected suppliers are in it for the long run, like us." Among the details on which he would like to see industrywide consensus is whether O&Ds are considered unidirectional or bidirectional.
Like Schoen, Gillespie also wants to see a collaborative effort to improve standardization, but doubts its feasibility.
"If standardization were easy, it would have been done by now," Gillespie said. "It would take a major grassroots effort by buyers and suppliers to make it happen, and it is not clear the economic gain would be worth the price, especially for global distribution systems and airlines."
"It would be worth ACTE taking the temperature of the industry and helpful to understand the economic value of standardization," Gillespie said. "The situation is not too bad in North America and Western Europe, but the rest of the world is still struggling, and that is where the growth is."
In the report, Gillespie lists several areas of nonstandardization that lead to data mismatches, including the prorating of fares for trips involving more than two legs. Different airlines, travel management companies and data consolidators use different origin & destination definitions to construct the itinerary, leading to varying allocations of the total fare to each leg of the journey.
Furthermore, global distribution systems and travel management companies can struggle to distinguish between the origin and destination of an itinerary and the individual sectors of which the trip is comprised. As an example, the report cites a company with travelers who fly frequently from London Heathrow via Brussels to Monrovia, Liberia. The travel management company could break down the data as a series of flights between Heathrow and Brussels, and another series between Brussels and Monrovia, omitting the crucial information that travelers are starting in London and finishing in Monrovia.
Gillespie also would like to see standardization of reporting periods for data. At present, airlines offer different management information according to booking, ticketing, invoicing or departure date. "This alone explains many discrepancies between reports run on the same data set," he said. Another culprit is taxes. Although it is common practice to include taxes and fees in total trip prices but omit them from origin & destination segment data, this convention is not observed consistently.
Schoen, meanwhile, said that sometimes an airline is not even consistent with its own practices, making administrative changes without considering the consequences for corporate customers. Schoen's team recently found in its card data a spike in maverick spend with one particular airline. Further investigation revealed the carrier had changed the coding it sent to Siemens' card company, the consequence being that officially sanctioned expenditures with the carrier instead appeared as personal bookings.
Some professionals consider hotel management information even more fraught with difficulty. "Generally, air is not where we are struggling to get data," said Greg Webb, chief marketing officer for Sabre.
Among the barriers preventing streamlined data collection are that less than 50 percent of hotels outside North America distribute through GDSs, and there is little harmonization of property management systems even within the same hotel chain. Buyers generally have with many more hotel agreements than they do with airlines, and traveler compliance with hotel policy is historically lower than it is for air.
Added Webb, "there is not a robust set of tools for validating corporate rates," making it difficult to track the accuracy of what is loaded on to the GDS.
A final problem identified by Webb is the absence of a universal property identification number. "It is different for each GDS," he says. "This is one issue that would not be difficult to fix. We have gone to the Hotel Electronic Distribution Network Association with a solution, but it didn't gain much traction."
Issues concerning standardization are not limited to suppliers. Leslie West, senior vice president for client data services at BCD Travel, said there are no conventions among TMCs for normalizing such data as currency conversions and mileage calculations. "It would require a worldwide governing body, and that doesn't exist today," she said.
Card issuers similarly risk data being lost or distorted by the complex flow of information that is released whenever a traveler makes a booking. The report explains how booking a trip through a TMC involving an air journey and a hotel stay routes data to the acquirer for each of the three merchants: the airline, the hotel and the TMC. Reconciling these different transactions to the same trip can prove challenging, especially if the merchants, acquirers and issuers involved do not use consistent identifiers.
According to Cecile Soulier, vice president of global corporate commerce development for MasterCard, such problems often can be solved through the simple, yet frequently neglected, expedient of dialogue.
"We recommend the client meet with its TMC, card issuer and card brand at the same time to outline what it wants regarding issues such as statement reconciliation and invoicing," Soulier said. "Often, this fails to happen, leading to painful situations because of a lack of communication and a lack of understanding from the customer that this process is not straightforward."
Editor's note: The author contributed to the ACTE white paper.