Data consolidation providers are adapting their reporting tools in efforts to keep up with the increasing pressure on travel managers to efficiently mine and report data for cost-saving purposes.
Travel data is a company's best weapon in negotiating fair contracts with air, hotel and rental car suppliers, particularly in a time when many travel managers are being directed to keep travel costs steady even as vendor costs are increasing. Data consolidators remain focused not only on deepening that well of information, but also on finding better ways to make that information useful to the travel manager.
"Corporate travel managers are becoming more sophisticated in their view and their requirements from higher up, and procurement officers are getting more involved in travel management, so the bar is higher," said Aaron Hosey, director of the decision support group for Bloomington, Ind.-based Cornerstone Information Systems. "The technology base of the travel industry was considered to be behind, but it's starting to catch up at a high pace."
For companies with multiple agencies, negotiating without such a data tool is not even worth considering, said Jim Lennon, global travel leader for PricewaterhouseCoopers. PwC is able to capture 80 percent to 90 percent of its air spending through TRX's Datatrax platform, which it then analyzes through another third party.
"Without the data, you're powerless," Lennon said.
Alpharetta, Ga.-based Hi-Mark Software now boasts more than 80 interfaces for data acquisition, which allows the company to aggregate and release data from more than 2,000 companies and 25 different countries, said Todd Kaiser, vice president of product marketing and business development for Hi-Mark. While Hi-Mark still is working on adding new interfaces for its customers, the bigger challenge now is finding ways to deliver meaningful information to the end-users, he said.
"We're seeing the trend towards the need for real-time information, so we've developed dashboards, metrics, alerts and key performance indicators to make forecasts," according to Kaiser. "They want to measure how the business is performing right now."
To that end, Hi-Mark's latest project focuses on a new presentation of its reporting tool for improving business intelligence and analytics. The presentation allows travel managers a one-click option for all their tools and analytics, packaging several reports into a single section.
It's the latest wrinkle for the company that recently has focused on tools designed to ease the problem of information overload, giving managers notification only of data that require some sort of action, such as when threshold goals for a carrier or hotel are not being met
(BTN, May 15). The company also is working on fully automated systems that can make adjustments in a particular market and notify users of those changes.
The focus on reports, however, does not mean that data consolidation providers are ignoring their focus on acquiring data. It's especially crucial, Hosey said, in light of the ongoing struggle between airlines and global distribution systems—a major source for the data companies—as major global distribution systems Amadeus and Sabre have agreed to leverage one another's access to nonparticipating carriers' fares
(BTN, March 20). Cornerstone, provider of the Web-based travel data consolidation tool IBank, recently has focused on overcoming that obstacle, he said.
"Something that is always a big concern is not being able to get the data," Hosey said. "With the negotiations between GDSs, our response was to build a very open-ended system on the front and the back of IBank."
The latest twist is Cornerstone's Effect System, a data transfer system that can send data to and from multiple sources, including from such nontraditional sources outside of global distribution systems as airline direct channels and risk management systems, Hosey said.
Risk management itself also is an increasing focus for data consolidators, according to both Hosey and Hi-Mark's Kaiser. Companies desire up-to-the-minute trip information so that they can locate a traveler should some sort of disaster happen in a region.
Cornerstone also recently introduced a tool that gives risk managers and travel managers immediate notification that someone is about to travel via a pre-travel, pre-ticketing real-time authorization. It's an answer to companies' desire to manage spend and risk at the detail level rather than going back and finding exceptions to travel policy after the fact, Hosey said.
Like Hi-Mark, Cornerstone also has worked on the visualization tools through IBank, he said. The analytical tools can be installed directly on the proper executive's desktop."This is something the marketplace is just starting to talk about," Hosey said. "We're just now getting to where you can get your data in one place."
TRX, meanwhile, has continued to upgrade the Datatrax platform. Datatrax is designed to integrate transaction data from any source and simplify those records into a single source of data. On the reporting side, the tool features drill-down and ad-hoc reporting and graphing, security filtering and language and currency conversion.
PwC global travel buyer Lennon said that his company has found the tool valuable beyond its ability to monitor air spending and to quantify potential savings on a deal. For example, the ability to monitor seat share in markets is a particularly useful segment of information, he said.
"Because airlines want to retain and increase marketshare, you can see if it's feasible that you could move marketshare to those airlines," Lennon said. "If Delta, for example, was looking to have a deal, and it has only 20 percent of the seat share in a particular city, then it's unreasonable to expect that Delta will get 100 percent of your business."