Good data has always been critical for effective travel management and procurement. Gaps in available content, divergent supplier strategies, disparate data sources and new regulations add to familiar problems with unreconciled, inaccurate or absent information. This can complicate reporting, prevent optimization and damage the integrity of managed travel programs. Now-expired full-content deals between airlines and global distribution systems threaten to make matters worse.
The latest edition of the Business Travel Executive Town Hall conducted in February featured a quartet of veteran travel management pros and a data specialist: Steven Mandelbaum, senior vice president for business solutions at education consulting company EAB, NetApp senior travel manager Mark Ziegler, Brink’s Inc. director of global travel Karoline Mayr, Maria Chevalier, global director for travel and expense at investment firm Pretium, and Dan Pirnat, founder and principal consultant at Data Insights Inc.
“Travel data has always been pretty messy,” Steven Mandelbaum told the live LinkedIn Audio session. “In terms of integration, the heyday is behind us. Now we find content fragmented and channels fragmented. While I’m optimistic about the amount of data out there that we can tap into in the future, we’re in for a rough road in terms of liberating it.”
Mandelbaum and his co-panelists pointed to emerging culprits and longtime problems with consolidating data across multiple legacy systems, old or unfinished traveler profiles, and particularly problematic hotel data. The lodging space is plagued by a steady flow of properties changing brand affiliations, owners and managers. It’s also an area where travelers are much more likely to book outside designated channels compared to airline bookings, necessitating reconciliation with expense data.
According to panelists, supplier-direct bookings, especially for non-air transactions, are on the rise. But it’s happening for airline tickets, too. NDC, or what airlines call “modern distribution” bookings, are a growing component of supplier-direct. “That is having a material impact on data quality, data richness, etc.,” said Data Insight founder Dan Pirnat. “This industry is only getting more complicated.”
Meanwhile, supplier-direct reporting portals built by airlines, hotels and others aren’t providing buyers with sufficient data. “In theory, it’s wonderful,” Pirnat said, but they fall short regarding data aggregation and decision support analytics.
The data downloaded from one such portal “doesn’t necessarily match the other airlines we’re working with,” Mark Ziegler explained. “We have to come up with a way to combine that and consolidate it.” He regularly uses his TMC’s portal but doesn’t always get what he needs. “I have to rely on a data analyst, like Dan’s company or from my TMC, to create the reports and data points I need to use in my program.”
Mandelbaum said he wanted suppliers to stop investing in their B2B reporting portals because it’s too much to expect a travel manager to log into multiple places routinely. “It’s an incredibly inefficient way to distribute data and an incredibly inefficient way for us to consume it,” he said. “The data is important, and if we can get it pushed to us in standard feeds, either through FTP or some other way, that would be way more useful.”
Many companies report climate impact data, including emissions from business travel, but collecting, normalizing and making sense of it can be difficult. “There’s a disconnect,” said Ziegler. “We’re trying to come up with some standardized questions for RFPs about sustainability for airlines, and we’ve had a lot of back and forth about what should be reported and what’s relevant and what’s not. As a buyer, it quickly gets confusing as to what type of reporting I need to provide to my company.”
Paths Forward
Panelists said corporate travel buyers should attempt to develop clear data strategies aligned with company goals and operating models, standardize data formats and reporting requirements with suppliers, and invest in data analysis and decision support tools.
For those new to the industry or managing less mature programs, Karoline Mayr advised starting with a review of what’s in raw data files for air, car and hotel transactions. She suggested adding custom reporting fields as necessary and removing what’s not needed to get questions with valuable answers.
For example, it’s common to ask for trip purpose during booking at the point of sale, and many companies, including Brink’s, use drop-down menus of options for that. “But if you just put text as an answer, someone will write you a book about what they’re doing, and that’s not something you can aggregate and report on,” Mayr said.
“Look at the footprint, where you are booking, what you’re spending, what’s been expensed and your corporate card data,” she said. You want to get a finger on all these data inputs and how you can use them to create your own reporting. You don’t have to be a data scientist to do that.”
Mandelbaum implored buyers to know their goals. When reporting on operational aspects, for example, you need real-time info. “You have a very different data need than if you’re trying to make some decisions based on past behaviors to change policy,” he said. When looking for an overall average ticket price or booking policy compliance figures, “you probably can use canned reports from your TMC. It won’t be perfect, but it will be directionally good enough to make some decisions.” If the need is tracking every traveler or reconciling in the accounting system, “those are different problems.”
Ziegler advised interfacing with expense management personnel to “understand what their processes are and that you understand what kind of data they are using.”
One strategy could be hiring a third-party firm specializing in aggregating, cleaning and enriching data. “Completeness, accuracy and the timing all should be part of any report card of how the downstream supplier is doing and their ability to correct what was incorrect from the prior cycle,” said Maria Chevalier. “Some third-party aggregator companies have made incredible inroads in addressing some of the challenges of the individual sources, especially the inconsistency from source to source. They help connect those dots in a much more effective way.”
More tips
“Don’t try to boil the ocean,” Chevalier said. “Just focus on three things at a time, get those under control and then start adding accordingly. As a travel manager, you become a consultant to the business to talk about the trends,” including demand patterns, behavioral shifts, price inflation, etc.
When sending out RFPs to suppliers, explain your reporting requirements. “You need to be very specific in these questions,” Mayr said. “The last thing you want to do is end up on the other side of the contract and have something that doesn’t work.”
Ensure you can get from TMC back office systems a “granular extract with the most raw segment level data,” Pirnat advised. “Constructing that into O&D data on the airline side is critical for procurement decision support purposes, but for measuring carbon impact, having the data segment level is crucial.”
Look for fare basis code level data. Fare basis codes are alphanumeric identifiers designating rules like advance purchase requirements, the amenities to be included and negotiated prices for specific corporate accounts. According to Pirnat, it’s “surprisingly challenging” to get at but is “more critical than ever in evaluating the discounts that a program has negotiated and put in place, and your utilization of that.”
First Things First
The promise of artificial intelligence and machine learning for improving corporate travel data and giving travelers a better experience is coming into focus. Chevalier envisioned quick access to relevant travel policies for travelers rather than expecting them to read and remember 50-page documents.
Pirnat suggested the industry should first perfect data cleanliness, accuracy and timeliness, allowing for a subsequent focus on new technologies to propel programs forward. “There’s a bit of an incongruence,” he said. “There are advancements in data handling and transfer mechanisms – whether APIs, data standards, etc. – yet the core underpinnings of travel data, regardless of source, remain problematic.
“The good news,” according to Pirnat, “is that when validating what your vendors can provide in terms of robust, accurate data, it boils down to a fairly small set – 10 or 12 ‘litmus test’ questions that can provide you an actionable approach to ask, ‘Are we heading in the right direction with our data strategy?’ It’s much like a maturity model framework, where you’re moving from where you are to where you desire to be. There are some green shoots of positivity, and it’s high time, given the fragmentation of content and channel fragmentation.”
