CWT Debuts Compliance-Check Tech

Carlson Wagonlit Travel recently made available to all of its clients a reporting tool that uses integrated agency and credit card data to measure air, car, hotel and rail program compliance.

The travel management company has been testing the tool with two clients, each with more than $100 million in global T&E spending, that have been receiving monthly reports using consolidated data from their corporate card providers, American Express and Diners Club, for more than six months, said CWT global product director of corporate card and expense management Dawn Raasch, who has been leading the development for more than a year.

The Agency+Card Reporting tool matches booked and actual data from CWT and the client's preferred card vendor to measure the percentage of air and hotel transactions in compliance with policy and highlight noncompliant travelers. The system uses customized reports and dashboard technology to track several compliance metrics in each spend category.

The travel management company plans to integrate the tool with other major card providers for clients who add it into CWT's Program Management Center portal, which it said is used by more than 10,000 clients. Travel technology firm TRX has been handling back-end data consolidation, normalization and cleansing using its DataTrax product.

While TRX handles much of the data consolidation and delivers daily feeds to CWT, the agency further normalizes the data to ensure consistency and avoid data irregularities and redundancies caused by inconsistent property categorization by hotel and credit card companies.

"You would be amazed at how hard it is to track the actual hotel properties and names with any sort of consistency," said TRX president and CEO Trip Davis, who found 2,000 to 3,000 duplicates in the 120,000-property database of hotel meta-search engine company VibeAgent, of which he is a board member.

The Agency+Card Reporting tool is available in 15 markets in North America and Europe, and Australia and Brazil. CWT plans to add additional markets, including China, but did not disclose a specific timeframe to do so, and said adding countries depends on obtaining daily data feeds into CWT's data repository.

Buyers long have been troubled by the lack of actual data reporting and have historically relied on booked data in supplier negotiations. According to Raasch, one test client has begun a sourcing initiative using the new tool. The test clients already have found discrepancies in booked versus actual data. One thought its hotel compliance was around the perceived industry average of 60 percent, but instead found the program in the 40 percent to 50 percent range.

"That's often the challenge for the agency and the buyer to say, 'I know what was booked through the agency, but what I need to know what was spent and what was billed once the traveler hits the street,' " said TRX's Davis. "We don't pay for what we reserve. We pay for what we spend."