Visibility Equals Success: The Power of Clean Data, Reporting, and Analytics for Travel Managers
In business, visibility equals success. Effective leaders depend on clean, relevant data from which they make informed decisions that move them closer towards attaining their business goals. Without visibility to accurate data, you’re flying blind and making choices without critical information, which could lead to costly mistakes. Read on, or click here to download the guide.
The most successful travel managers know that an on-demand reporting and analytics platform is their secret weapon for effective travel program management. Here are 5 steps to follow…
Step 1: Gather all of your Travel Data Sources in One Place
The first step in building visibility is to capture all the sources of relevant travel data in one, easily accessible place. Gaining an understanding of your travel data sources will not only show you employee travel patterns but also what types of employee travel exist outside of your control. You will see what is being booked through unmanaged online websites or directly with non-preferred travel suppliers.
Consolidating Data Sources:
Depending on the nature of your travel program, you’ll need to work with a travel management provider like CI Azumano Business Travel to help consolidate and normalize these data sources into one platform. This will give your organization the visibility you will need to start making the right choices to protect your travelers and drive savings.
Step 2: Define the Reports that Will Drive Meaningful Analysis
Spend to Budget Reporting: Your Travel Management Summary
Summary or detail views, by department, cost center or traveler, will ensure that you stay on budget and keenly aware of opportunities to drive compliance and savings.
Preferred Travel Suppliers Reporting:
Detailed reporting on your top hotel chains, car rental providers, and air carriers will strengthen your negotiating power, leading to better rates and amenities for your travelers.
Traveler Behavior Reporting
Traveler program adoption will have a significant effect on your travel spend. Your reporting platform will help you isolate opportunities to drive education and adoption in your organization.
It’s a fact of human nature employee travelers will book outside of policy. Employee travelers may not know about company travel policies, or they may think they can find cheaper deals and better perks on their own. However, employees booking outside of policy will increase cost and risk for their organization if they book with non-preferred vendors (which will drive up travel spend), or if tragedy strikes while traveling on company business (learn more about Duty of Care here).
Who’s booking outside of policy?
On aggregate, travelers who book out of policy spend as much as 30% more than those who book within the travel program. Reporting will help you find these “rogue” travelers while giving you the tools to educate and encourage better participation.
A policy compliance KPI tracks how often your travelers are booking according to travel policy, and identifies individual travelers or departments that might need some additional training or incentives to improve policy adoption.
What policy changes could drive adoption or savings?
Small changes to policy can drive big benefits. For example, booking air at least 14 days before travel generally results in lower fares. Reporting can show you how many of your travelers are booking closer in, and what that’s doing to your average air tickets, your overall budget, and what changes you could make to alter that behavior.
Unused Ticket Reporting:
Travel plans change at a moment’s notice. That’s why a significant amount of airline tickets booked for business travel go unused. CI Azumano Business Travel proactively tracks, monitors, and reports on all unused airline credits. Proactive management of unused airline credits is proven to drive as much as 3-7% off of total travel spend.
Travel management providers like CI Azumano Business Travel will assign an Account Manager to help you make sense of all the data, identify employees or departments that are falling out of compliance, and build a case to bring them under control, driving measurable savings and reducing risk.
Actionable Reporting & Analytics
CI Azumano Business Travel offers its clients a web-based data management platform offering over 250 standard reports and user-defined reports upon demand or on a scheduled broadcast basis with detailed and summary reports focusing on air, hotel and, car transactions.
Step 3: Improve Travel Policy Compliance
Combining TMC provider booking data with expense reporting and credit card data reveals where your current travel policy is coming up short. Once you can see which employees or which departments are falling outside of compliance, you can approach them with the hard data to make your case for compliance.
Travel management providers like CI Azumano Business Travel will assign an Account Manager to help you make sense of all the data, identify employees or departments that are falling out of compliance, and build a case to bring them under control, driving measurable savings and reducing risk.
Our Account Managers have extensive experience in all aspects of corporate travel management
Effective and ongoing assessment of your spend, existing travel patterns, and behavior
Assistance with supplier negotiations
Recommendations to maximize the savings from your policy
Advanced management information reporting and benchmarking
Step 4: Benchmark Performance Against Your Peers
Benchmarking (comparing your performance to organizations that have similarly sized travel budgets) is an incredibly powerful way to determine if you’re travel spending is out of whack, and what changes need to be made.
Travel spend benchmarking can reveal what your peers are spending per trip and per employee. Benchmarks will also show industry averages for airfare, hotel, or car suppliers, giving you the objective information to power your supplier management strategy.
CI Azumano Business Travel provides a powerful benchmarking platform that will score your organization’s performance vs. the marketplace, across several critical performance measurements. This business intelligence platform will allow you to plan “what if” scenarios, showing you in real-time, how policy changes can drive savings and meet, or exceed industry benchmarks for performance.
Step 5: Capture Savings
You’ve captured your travel data sources, compiled them into one platform, and started to identify gaps and opportunities. You’re on step 5. You’re ready to capture savings through data-driven insights.
Track travel spending against cost center budgets, allowing you to adjust policy as spending passes major budget milestones.
Determine which travel categories, and which suppliers, are driving the most spend. This will give your organization the leverage to negotiate stronger preferred supplier agreements.
Compare your travel spend against your competitors, giving you a powerful rationale to push travel policy changes.
Track hotel room rates, and airline ticket pricing for opportunities to shift suppliers.
Become a cost savings hero for your company by making data-driven decisions on cost savings initiatives, and presenting proof through measurable tracking and reporting.
Good Luck and Safe Travels!
CI Azumano Business Travel is your complete resource for travel management. Our strategic blend of people and technology empowers companies to maximize ROI on every aspect of travel. At CI Azumano, we combine our in-depth travel industry knowledge with a steadfast commitment to customer service to deliver innovative business travel solutions.