You have a wealth of travel data in your program, but should you consider turning it into wealth for you program?
Companies buy and sell data all the time. Is it time for travel buyers to get in on the game? And what would the ramifications be? Are the risks greater than the rewards? Would companies buy in? Suppliers surely might consider it.
It is no secret that when you go out to a website to shop for something, the next thing you know that company is magically appearing in your Facebook feed. A little annoying? Absolutely. And actually more than a bit creepy.
One time in a grocery line, while scrolling through Facebook waiting my turn, a woman appeared in my ‘People You May Know.’ Well, I was sure she wasn’t – that is until I looked up and saw it was the woman in front of me in line. A complete stranger infiltrated my world without my having any control over it.
So that started me thinking, I wonder what the use of Phat Data would look like in a world where buyers can use that data to improve their program, save money or increase rebates by offering up their travel data. Now, I know, I know; most buyers are thinking, Is she crazy? And suppliers are thinking, How do we make this work?! Oh, and yes, we have to consider data privacy. But let’s take a dive into what this could look like in a future state.
Let’s start by exploring the opportunities, then we can consider the challenges. To begin with, we already share data among our suppliers. The OBT passes data to the GDS, the GDS passes it to air, car, hotel and other suppliers. And yes, it contains personally identifiable information.
What if we could anonymize some aspects of our travel data and then sell that to suppliers? Let’s explore an easy example. A travel buyer has a large group traveling to a specific destination. Ground transportation at the destination airport has not been pre-arranged. The travel manager also has a business relationship with a rideshare provider.
If the buyer took an arrival and/or departure manifest, anonymized it, and simply gave the number of people on a specific flight to the rideshare vendor, that vendor could then stage cars in the area, provide a discount on the ride – based on their corporate profile – and provide the company a back-end rebate over and above anything already negotiated.
Rideshare companies are already looking to have you invite travelers through their portals by uploading e-mail addresses. That is much more invasive than anonymized data. At least one major air carrier has a mileage relationship with a ridesharing company. Does anyone think they might be sharing data? Is it better for you to control the use of the data that is all voluntary, anonymous, and potentially a financially beneficial model for the managed travel program?
There are many applications where buyers could use their travel-related data to gain monetary advantages for their programs. This may seem farfetched, but what about your preferred suppliers that often come to you with status match offers because they have used your tour codes to identify those travelers who don’t have status? Could buyers reverse that conversation? Absolutely.
With NDC, airlines are wanting to have more strategic opportunities to merchandise their ancillary products to travelers, so a pay-to-play model is intriguing. The opportunities could be endless and the financial rewards lucrative.
Considering the RisksHowever, all this doesn’t come without consequences and difficulties.
Probably the biggest challenge is getting corporate buy-in. Corporations need to ensure that they are protecting their employees’ data. The idea of “selling” their employees’ data would raise a gigantic red flag like no other. Before anything could happen, a very compelling business case would have to be built and even then, getting it past all the powers that be could take months or years. Suppliers probably are likely to have moved on to lower hanging fruit by then.
The second biggest challenge is around GDPR – the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation. Would this pass the Brussels sniff test? I’m not sure. What if you anonymize data, and then an employee wants their data removed from everything in your system, does the anonymized data still need to be deleted? And how would you know what to delete? Good questions. We can leave that to the data privacy and legal folks.
Let’s not stop there; we could imagine even worse ramifications. What if you were “incentivized” (i.e., paid), to provide this data and then something goes wrong. Are you liable? Is the company liable? Some lawyer somewhere could try to make a case. If your contracts included clauses that pertain to utilization factors that data suppliers paid to obtain, could that put your entire agreement at risk?
At this time, the challenges appear to outweigh the benefits. But then again, I didn’t ever expect to be new Facebook friends with a total stranger from a grocery store line.
In the commoditizing of data, it would certainly “Phatten” the pot, but at the end of the day who really has the advantage? Governments legislate data privacy. The selling of data is commonplace in other industries. Buyers are constantly under pressure to ensure that their travelers’ data is private. And yet, their travelers share their worldly travels with the entire planet on social media.
What’s a Buyer To Do?Travel buyers need to realize that they have an immense amount of data within their program and at some point the use of that data could be in the travelers’, the companies’ and the travel programs’ favor.
Buyers aren’t going to wake up tomorrow with suppliers knocking at their doors to buy their data (well, maybe they will after this story), but they need to keep the opportunity in the back of their minds and begin thinking about what might be the inevitable use of Phat Data.
If you have built this consideration into your Phat Data strategy, good for you. It might be a good time to start preparing. If not now, when…?
Jennifer Steinke is vice president Global Travel Experience at WHoldings, and an industry thought leader with over 30 years experience managing corporate travel. She holds an MBA plus Certified Corporate Travel Executive (CCTE) and Global Travel Professional (GTP) certifications from GBTA. Jennifer strives to deliver innovative and thought provoking ideas to the corporate travel industry.