The BTE Town Hall takes a deep dive into corporate travel data  and how to make it work for you and your stakeholders

It’s hard to wrangle corporate travel data. Organizing what’s meaningful and transforming that into something compelling for executives and other stakeholders may be harder still.

During the February Business Travel Executive Town Hall conducted via LinkedIn Live, a pair of seasoned travel managers – Megin Dressel, travel manager at engineering company Keller, and Maria Chevalier, global director for travel and expense at investment firm Pretium – shared their best practices and pitfalls to avoid. 

Both Dressel and Chevalier stressed the importance of knowing the audience for the data and presenting it in ways that best suit them. Some prefer to see the details; most seek actionable insights. Some department leaders want access to all the data to slice and dice themselves. For others, standard templates set up by the travel team do the trick. And the business context matters. For example, high-growth companies have different needs than distressed ones.

Determining precisely what executives need from travel data is “always the million-dollar question,” said Dressel. “What they’re looking for probably isn’t an Excel spreadsheet with a dump of your data. They want to know what they can do with that data. They may be looking for a way to close a compliance hole. They want to know who’s off the reservation and how to fix it.”

The role determines the need. “My meetings with the CEO are very different than with the CFO than with the head of sales,” Chevalier said. “The CFO wants to know how to save money. The head of HR asks if travelers are happy and safe.”

See Things Their Way

Researching how the intended recipients of the data like to see it can go a long way. Chevalier likes to look at their backgrounds, how they speak and the verbiage they use. She will “literally” interview co-workers who previously presented to those executives to “avoid some of the land mines.”

It is helpful to review recent presentations by those executives. “Let’s be real,” Dressel said. “Your favorite way of seeing things is your way. Do they like pie charts, line charts and all the details, or do they just want a summary? You’ll see that pretty quickly in the materials they’ve produced for other people.”

C-suite execs generally want summary data because they are too busy to pick through the minutiae. “They’re going to spend two minutes with you, max,” Dressel said. “You have to be able to tell your story in that time. If I send them to a dashboard, they may glance at it the first time, but they’re not going to know where to look for the particular detail. If I send them a slide or two or an e-mail that says, ‘I need your help with this particular item,’ then they’re going to focus on that and to do what needs to be done.”

Chevalier limits the focus of reports to “the three things that I want them to know about what happened in travel and what we’re doing to change it,” she said. “More than that and you’re going to lose everybody.”

Drilling Down

Farther down on the org chart, managers and business unit leaders may want more granular details – or even access to databases – to help them determine how to meet specific goals.

In these scenarios at Keller, “they don’t want data to figure out what the problem is,” Dressel said. “They want the data to know who’s causing the problem. They want my summary-level report that will say, ‘We need to address these items,’ and then they want to click on the report and say, ‘To address item one, I need to talk to these people. To address item two, we have to solve this problem with accounts payable,’ or whatever it is,” she explained.

“We do that for every facet, not just travel,” she added. “If you are looking at project costs, there’s a dashboard that shows whether you’re on track against your projections, and if you’re not, you can click through and see which line items are causing that. We use the same sort of concept for our travel reporting.”

The danger is that the users who drill down may not understand the complexities and come up with incorrect interpretations. “It has to come with knowledge and warnings,” Chevalier said.

What’s the Score? 

According to both travel managers, visual depictions are often more effective than data tables. They strive to maintain consistency in reporting, making it easier for recipients to find what they need. Still, occasionally evolving data displays and the information conveyed, and highlighting what has changed, can help boost attention.

Scorecards are a common tool for communicating data and leveraging executives’ innate competitiveness to drive behavioral change and improve performance.

It’s a matter of priority. For Dressel, in a previous role at a manufacturing firm, cost savings was the most important metric. So scorecards showed which parts of the company were generating the most. Now at Keller, the focus is safety, “and safety for travel is driven through duty of care, which means booking in-channel. So we scorecard on that,” she said.

“We are producing reporting that shows who’s in or out, and we’re doing it down to a pretty low level so that people can see not only what business unit is compliant or not and at what rate, but right down to the branch or office within that particular business unit,” Dressel explained. “The people managing those groups are looking at each other and asking, ‘He got 80 percent. Why am I only getting 70 percent?’ “

Owning the Imperfections 

Regardless of the format in which data is presented, the information providers – in this case, travel departments – should be transparent about imperfections and unavoidable inconsistencies. They should explain to data recipients where issues might arise. “As long as they have a firm grasp of that, they’re pretty tolerant,” Dressel said. “When you don’t disclose to them ahead of time that it might be coming, it’s going to blow up in your face.”

Chevalier includes disclaimers in each report about potential false positives because, while bad data kills credibility, “there is no such thing as perfect data.” She is a proponent of third-party data aggregators that help validate and clean data “because they cross-reference across multiple sources.”

Other takeaways:

• Don’t try to jam everything into one report. You can always go back with supplements as needed.

• When presentations fall flat, learn from it. “Fail fast and move on,” Dressel said. “Don’t fall into the death-by-PowerPoint trap.”

• To avoid missing opportunities, consider creating new reports and standardizing what had been ad-hoc reporting.

The Traveler’s Tale 

Internal data storytelling isn’t aimed only at executives and managers up the chain. Travelers also need information that explains the value of the managed travel program and how it makes their lives easier and safer. 

Duty of care is critical.  The January crash of an American Airlines flight at Washington National was a teachable moment for Keller’s three-year-old travel program. Confirming “within minutes” that no travelers who booked through the designated channel were on that flight “rings with people,” Dressel said.

She also mentioned sharing stats with travelers indicating which travel brands help the company save money: “They’ve got to meet their numbers. They’ve got to hit their project budget. So that’s meaningful to them. Do they want super-detailed stuff? Probably not.”  n

Visit businesstravelexecutive.com to listen to this complete LinkedIn Audio session and find details about the next BTE Town Hall.