The world is back to normal, including corporate travel. Of course, that usually means the “chaotic normal” we all took for granted pre-pandemic. It’s too bad that pre-pandemic pricing did not come back either – but that’s a discussion for another time.

The return on investment from business travel is an increasing concern due to rising costs. Many factors are driving these costs up faster than inflation, but one primary reason is the aviation industry’s inability to manufacture new airplanes to keep up with demand. The world’s major airlines are generating robust financials even as consumer demand weakens. The primary reason for this is their pricing power in premium cabins, especially on critical trans-Atlantic routes.

And yet, calculating ROI on business travel can seem like chasing a dream – lots of romance but not much action. The major reason for this, I believe, has been the poor state of managed travel data. The corporate travel industry has been efficient at processing travel itineraries but very unexceptional in reporting on this activity.

AI to the Rescue 

Fortunately, help is on the way. The reason is artificial intelligence. How can costly AI help us calculate ROI on business travel? Because AI does not tolerate insufficient data. The AI industry is booming, and that is putting it mildly. Having started two data science companies in the past 20-plus years, including my current Cerebri AI, where we focused on corporate travel analytics, I can say our aim is progress, and results are accelerating like never before.

However, before we could make progress, we had to start by fixing corporate travel data. We had to automate on a global basis the reconciling and aggregating of the double and triple counting of travel transactions (using your corporate card to buy travel at your in-program travel management company and then expensing it, etc.).

Now What?

Once data works, ROI is not hard to follow up with. The easiest ROI to calculate is in sales. Connect your CRM to your newly scrubbed travel data, and it is relatively easy to see that a trip costs “$X” and, within a short timeframe, generates “$Y” revenues. But business is never usually that simple – which is a totally fair comment – because every business is different, and success means many things. Focusing on sales in determining ROI is a great place to start because every sales group I have ever managed has always been good at keeping score. Sales commissions at risk focus the mind like nothing else!

Using sales as a metric does not mean looking at the sales department’s travel spending alone. A good example is the cost of supporting customers. A tech support team travels to a customer to fix problems; what happens to revenues from that customer in the next month? The next quarter? These are easy metrics to pull out of the CRM and ERP systems most companies use today.

More straightforward returns to analyze are not restricted to sales. You have a large HR team that travels to a “troubled” site with high staff turnover. Following that visit, did the staff turnover at that site go down the next quarter? What were the results the next year? HR departments are incredibly good at keeping statistics because of the heavy regulatory responsibilities placed on them by governments at all levels. With travel data fixed, this is a great area to focus on.

This leads us to the question of what is usually known as the “complex selling problem.” We have dozens, even hundreds, of people “touching” a customer. How can we determine what travel caused sales success, revenue growth, etc.? Complex selling is a challenging problem that requires AI modeling to solve. I would not recommend starting here. We can sort this out, but it takes significant budget resources and a great data science team. The returns are enormous, but there are many other places to look for easy wins. Why start by trying to climb Mount Everest?

Be Brave 

Before AI, businesses were constantly complaining they were drowning in data. With AI, you never have enough data. AI modeling teaches you to be bold, use all of the relevant data you can get your hands on, and then see what works and go with that. 

When travel data gets fixed, calculating ROI is off to the races. Creativity in designing the metrics that suit your business is the key. What defines success in sales, customer support, HR, manufacturing, etc., changes as you move from one vertical to another, from one country to the next. The answer is to be brave and go for it. The rewards are there for you to capture. 

If you don’t, your competitors will get there soon.