Orlando – Travel
and Transport announced Sunday that during the fourth quarter, the company will
introduce a data analysis tool that not only pulls in travel data—from travel
management company, card and expense—but also will bring such data sources as human
resources, budget, supplier, social media, finance and weather to bear on
travel program reporting. The TMC will create a subsidiary company to market
and sell the tool.
“Anyone can create a reporting system, but to make it
meaningful and answer the tough questions and visualize the data and affect
travel policy and traveler satisfaction is the crux of the issue,” Travel and Transport
general manager of strategic initiatives Brian Beard said during a press
conference on Sunday at the Global Business Travel Association’s national
convention in Orlando. “It hasn’t really been done effectively, but it will be
a big battleground moving forward.”
To that end, the TMC is working with partners to bring diverse
data together into a reporting platform for business travel. “The tech exists
today for the gathering, warehousing and visualization of the data, so our job
is to [build the integrations that] bring it together,” said Beard, noting that
Travel and Transport is not hiring teams of developers to start from scratch.
“This is why we can start a project like this in February and make an
announcement about a Q4 launch,” he said.
The yet-to-be-named technology is in beta stage with a
select group of clients, said Beard, and while it clearly will target travel
program measures and performance, the opportunities will extend well beyond. As
an example, Beard offered the concept of pulling in financial data from a
client’s top travel markets to forecast hotel rate changes and how they would
impact future travel budgets.
“There are so many things that affect travel,” said Beard.
“As we get better at it, we’ll hone our models. It’s evolving. That’s the nature
of big data, and it’s not widely understood by this industry.”
Beyond Travel
Management
Travel and Transport is likely to license the platform to
competitive TMCs, but that is not the only unique aspect of the tool. The
company also has designs to introduce the platform to verticals outside travel
altogether.
Big data is big data and the more comprehensive it gets, the
more applications it is likely to have beyond travel management. “We believe it
has potential for different business services,” said Beard, noting that a
handful of clients that have the tool in beta have already asked about additional
applications. “It has some big legs,” he said. Thus the formation of a
subsidiary to market and manage the product.
The tools will be offered to clients as a
software-as-a-service, and the cost of entry, according to Beard, will be “very
affordable,” well under the six-figure price tags of some other business
intelligence tools because, said Beard, the people who need this type of tool
are often not the same people who are holding the corporate purse strings.