Intelligent design

How to make sense of your corporate travel data

BCD Travel In Motion, October 2007

The key to good travel data management is delivering it at the right time to the right people to answer business questions. That means understanding the life-cycle of data: some tasks require instant information, whereas others benefit from taking the long-term view.

Management information is the cement which binds together all the building bricks of a corporate travel program. Among the many key tasks driven by data are:

  • Tracking travelers
  • Measuring compliance with policy
  • Negotiating with vendors
  • Providing a trail for auditors
  • Trending analytics for supplier management

The data required for these tasks is gathered from many sources, including the travel management company, card provider, directly from suppliers and from internal sources, such as accounts payable. It can be tempting for travel managers to want to see all data from all of these sources as quickly as possible. However, this is not necessarily the ideal way to proceed, warns Leslie West, senior vice president for client data services at BCD Travel . A blizzard of data could leave the buyer in an information white-out, unable to see what is meaningful for the specific business question at hand.

"What clients really need is to receive data and business intelligence at the right time to answer appropriate business questions," says West. One example is security. For this purpose, information needs to be as accurate as possible, so when a major incident arises, travel managers have accurate information on where travelers are with respects to the incident. West notes that security is very much a shared responsibility between the travel management company (TMC) and the corporation: "Travelers often change elements of their itineraries en route without properly informing the appropriate channels, compromising not only the data integrity but the company's security initiatives."

At the other end of the data life-cycle, information for trending needs to take into account the aggregate of all changes such as MCOs (Miscellaneous Charge Orders – general purpose vouchers for services provided by a company, usually an airline) and add-collects (an additional cost assessed, usually on an airline ticket, to cover an increase in the ticket). Supplier negotiations do not need to be real-time. Instead, travel managers need to look at the data retrospectively to identify spending patterns over a longer period. By waiting for spend data a travel manager is more likely to paint a precise picture. 

Another related issue is how comprehensive data needs to be to allow travel managers to do their job. There are many reasons which explain why the information a travel manager sees is never 100 percent complete. These range from travelers not booking through the approved channel to not paying with their corporate card.  BCD Travel goes to great lengths to standardize the data it receives, and create common definitions and calculations of single data elements to present it in a usable format. Without applying thousands of business rules to normalize the data, the information would never be usable.

It is also important to realize, says West, that different business needs require different levels of comprehensiveness . Once again, security-related data for tracking travelers needs to be as close to 100 percent as possible for obvious reasons. As most of a company's buying power resides in 80 percent of their data, the familiar 80/20 business rule is more likely to be appropriate to negotiate with suppliers.

There are obvious additional benefits in taking your data beyond 80 percent, West believes. "That last 20 percent is typically outside the control of the TMC and the corporation and is probably not going to swing who you do your deals with one way or the other," she says. "Although the desire for complete data is strong and mutual, the cost of pursuing the extra data far outweighs the benefits received –- for all parties."  West also points out that buyers have the most reliable and available data for their top markets, where they have the greatest buying power.