That’s why travel management companies, expense software developers and suppliers are expending so much effort to come up with pragmatic, secure solutions to unravel the dining spend enigma.
Much is at stake. A 2017 report by American Express Global Business Travel and the GBTA Foundation pegs dining as the third largest area of business travel spend behind lodging and airfare, posting a sizeable $77 billion in 2016.
With millions of business trips multiplied by millions more meals purchased, controlling this area of spend without assistance is truly a Herculean task. It’s not surprising therefore to find many creative reporting solutions to track dining spend for every business large and small.
Neveu says these include, “but are not limited to,” the ability to tag meal category – breakfast, lunch, dinner, etc. – while instantly adding meal attendees, which he points out is required by the IRS.
Moreover Certify allows users to identify attendee type by employee, customer, prospect, vendor, and others, as well as cost center, project or business unit. Additionally, all meals can be subject to corporate policy limits, including meal amounts per attendee or total meal limit.
“Certify also offers its SpendSmart report available free to the public,” Neveu says. “The report provides quarterly insights into the average amount Certify clients spend on meals as well as the average amount spent per vendor, and a handy 1-5 star rating review of vendors."
Capture the Moment
But what about those pesky cash receipts? “The key element for making dining expenses easy to manage is giving employees the ability to simply and accurately capture the transaction data at the point of purchase,” according to Barbara Doane, director of product marketing at global expense management provider Chrome River.
Doane explains most expense automation solutions today incorporate optical character recognition technology which allows travelers to capture an image of the receipt using their mobile phone. In turn the image is automatically uploaded to the expense tracking system. An analysis of the receipt’s keywords or even a restaurant’s logo can categorize the dining spend, even matching trip and traveler and creating an expense line item.
“However,” Doane cautions, “this isn’t the be-all-and-end-all, because dining expense reporting can be surprisingly complex. Two of the biggest reasons for this are tipping and expense policies for handling meals.”
Tackling the expense beast is increasingly a question of being agile – and mobile, according to Jason Mills, director of customer experience at expense management provider Expensify. “Our expense management app makes it easy for customers to track receipts and manage expenses on the go,” Mills says. “While many receipt tracking tools now offer OCR, Expensify’s SmartScan technology can also read handwriting. This is great for dining receipts that often include handwritten tips and the final receipt total.”
The Expensify app also has an attendee tracking feature to keep tabs on which colleagues or clients were present for a meal, allowing the company to enforce a per-meal spending limit while giving managers visibility into each dining expense.
Eric Tyree, chief data scientist at Carlson Wagonlit Travel recommends that larger corporations integrate card, travel and expense data. “A card gives you vendor detail; expense, detail from the traveler perspective,” Tyree explains. “For example, client entertainment vs. personal sustenance, along with other colleagues at the meal, client the meal was associated with, etc. And travel data which gives you trip/travel context and whether it was ancillary spend associated with a hotel or airline or an independent vendor. This helps to negotiate better with suppliers.”
Once the data is integrated, Tyree says, the right tools can yield a goldmine of valuable insights, such as identifying additional savings opportunities including leakage/compliance issues, information about the business unit and travelers, expenses not related to the trip, as well as the true cost of every trip.
Data is integrated so costs can be reported and analyzed by trip, not just by type of travel. In addition compliance issues and new cost areas, such as ancillary and non-trip spend, can be identified and managed more effectively.
Turning the Tables
Dinova has taken a different approach to managing dining spend, creating a business dining marketplace which gives travelers choice and corporations a scalable way to manage dining spend.
“Dinova is the authority for business dining, which is an often-overlooked category because of the fragmented state of the restaurant industry,” says Shannon Delaney, vice president of marketing. “In the past, if a travel manager wanted to save on dining they would contract directly with restaurants. Well, there are more than 650,000 restaurants in the United States – how hard would that be?”
As Delaney points out, “It’s difficult for any one company to aggregate spend in an efficient and effective manner,” she says. She explains that Dinova offers a “uniquely business dining-focused marketplace” that gives the opportunity for employees to select from a wide range of restaurants (16,000-plus) and save their company money too.“What makes our solution creative is offering corporations, government and small businesses the chance to capture rogue spend, earn a rebate and invest those funds back into their respective travel programs for overall cost-avoidance,” Delaney says. “The best part about Dinova is the more it’s used, the more money can be saved.”
“What makes our solution creative is offering corporations, government and small businesses the chance to capture rogue spend, earn a rebate and invest those funds back into their respective travel programs for overall cost-avoidance,” Delaney says. “The best part about Dinova is the more it’s used, the more money can be saved.”
She adds that Dinova has the technology to support the program and diner experience while offering an “unmatched” loyalty program called myDinova. Employees earn personal points for every dining experience on company business using their corporate credit cards in Dinova partner restaurants.
It’s apparent that business travel is undergoing a substantial shift from the business travel experience of years gone by. Today more attention is being paid to business travelers’ needs and even their preferences on the road.
“We all know the travel industry is changing – with Boomers starting to retire and Millennials moving into the workforce in large numbers,” says Delaney. “Traveler experience has become a focal point for procurement and travel managers. This shift to traveler satisfaction and the evolution of mobile and travel tools has technology moving toward a more centralized experience that caters to the individual.”
The Demographics of Dining
In spring of 2018, Dinova published a white paper, The Business Of Business Dining, in partnership with GBTA. “What we found were some amazing generational differences – for example, Millennials are cautious spenders – mobile and technology habits and how travelers view dining on the road,” Delaney explained. “These data points offer travel managers a glimpse into what their people are thinking and how traveler experience can be improved to attract and retain top talent while being mindful of the overall bottom line.”
Among the findings, the research provided insights into generational business traveler dining preferences:
• Millennials largely opt for quicker, cheaper dining options. 51 percent of Millennials choose fast food while traveling; 53 percent said they did research to find restaurants that were close to their travel destinations, preferring to save time and ‘eat on the go.’
• For Baby Boomers, the longer the career, the larger the restaurant tab. Boomers were the segment most likely to “wine and dine,” with 79 percent saying they prefer upscale dining choices while on business.
• While Boomers prefer upscale establishments and Millennials opt for multi-tasking meals, Gen X is the “happy medium.” Fast casual was their top restaurant category, reflecting a concern with both quality and convenience; 63 percent reportedly researched restaurant reviews, while 60 percent said they also researched restaurants that were nearby.
“The driver behind creating a more positive traveler experience is not only good for the business traveler but for the company as well,” says Lexi Banakis, senior director of intelligence and analytics at Advito, a division of BCD Travel. “Besides increased productivity, corporations are becoming so much more aware of the link between traveler wellness and employee retention.”
From the financial aspect, Banakis notes that it is more costly to replace an employee versus taking care of the employee you have. “To maximize retention you must ensure they’re doing well; that they’re healthy. A healthy, happy employee is a good employee.”
But, she warned, the balance is that they are not free to do whatever they please because travel managers also have a budgetary responsibility to their organizations and in some instances, are required to meet regulatory standards.
The first step to managing each of these facets, she says, is building a data strategy. “For some, it’s not a problem of a lack of T&E data; it’s the lack of a useful data strategy to manage the total cost of trip. We foster traveler engagement through the use of historical, booking, expense and current data to drive user experience in a positive way.”
Tyree recommends a similar approach for better traveler engagement, among other benefits. “Once the data is integrated (card, travel and expense), business intelligence tools can be used to extract an amazing amount of value from it. Traveler communication can be personalized because the travel patterns, behaviors and preferences of each traveler can be better understood.”
Another benefit, he says, is improved communication between business units. When that happens, the various needs of each business unit can be better understood and incorporated into the travel program. And most important, Tyree says breaking down traveler/business unit data enables the application of “retail-style analytics” of the organization’s travelers to “understand and manage behavior better.”
Business intelligence tools and software apps are rapidly revolutionizing the capture and reporting of dining spend all along the value chain. But as Dinova’s The Business Of Business Dining, white paper puts it, “The face of the modern business traveler is ever-changing, but they all have at least one thing in common: They’ve all got to eat.”
