How data is shaping the traveler experience

Travel managers have long looked for a way to improve the traveler experience. They’re providing new tools and services to the employees, hoping that this will increase compliance and reduce costs. 

However, these results are not often achieved, because tools are implemented without a true understanding of the traveler and their needs.

In our upcoming white paper, we’re looking at how data is shaping the traveler experience – and how it drives travel management to achieve results.

For this research project, Phocuswright partnered with AirPlus International to understand how much has changed since Big Data was first talked about in corporate travel.

Phocuswright conducted in-depth interviews with travel managers across Europe and North America to understand how data has been shaping the corporate travel industry, what the biggest challenges remain to this day and what they wish they could do tomorrow.

Travel managers know that having another tool isn’t the answer any longer. They’re actively searching for ways to understand travelers – and they are using data to do this. On the principle of ‘once you know your clients’, travel managers will be in a much better place to roll out the right tools and services to support their employees throughout the travel experience.

Data today is an integral part in travel management. It’s helping travel managers tell the story of travel – the complexities and challenges. Many use data already to get other departments on board with the travel program.

Enabling those departments, like finance, HR and security to better understand travel eases friction and promotes collaboration across the board. Data is also helping educate travelers about company benefits around the travel program;which in turn increases compliance because employees usually want to do the right thing. 

It’s been many years since Big Data was hyped in corporate travel. Many of the promised functionalities are still in the development pipeline, but others have been adopted by travel managers who are getting more and more confident in using data for running their travel programs. 

Companies, too, are making progress as they begin to understand the strategic importance of travel for their own success: from increased sales to traveler well-being and employee retention.

While data is helping the overall understanding of travel in companies, many travel managers are wary of quality and accuracy. Partly because data analysis today still involves too much manual input.

This is usually caused by integrating different data sources into one platform. Taking out duplicates from the system and other data cleansing costs time andresources, and increases the risk of errors of the whole data set. 

“Yes, I do feel comfortable using data. However, there’s so much human interaction and tweaking involved in many of the data sets, that I’m not 100% confident in using everything we get from different sources.”

Travel managers are mostly comfortable working with data and find TMC data the most reliable source to work with. However, they are quick to acknowledge that they don’t have full insight into travel spend and see clear shortcomings in terms of data quality, granularity and actionability. 

Issues with data access and analysis challenges mean travel managers still haven’t a complete overview of what drives traveler decisions. They mainly use raw data to do their own analysis, stating that the dashboards often provided by suppliers aren’t granular enough; or don’t provide answers to their questions.

As the chart below shows, excel templates and TMC dashboards are used by 63% and 56% of interviewed travel managers; while 31% said they have their own, in-house BI tool which they hope will be supplemented with other data streams from different departments in the near future.

Understanding travelers by analyzing raw data and using multiple different data streams is cumbersome. It needs time and resources, and the danger is getting so engrossed in the data that the original question is forgotten. Or fatigue sets in after hours spent on cleaning and de-duplicating data sets. Insights get lost as other tasks take priority over data analysis and so the travel program stays the same – without progressing the way it should with all the promised data.

To understand travelers, travel managers really need to do a tightrope act that gives them granular data that’s traceable to business units and individuals AND gain permission to match employees’ details all within the safeguards and boundaries of GDPR. 

All of this means that the “standard” dashboards are not enough.Just like other industries have seen over the last few years, the one-size-fits-all approach isn’t working any longer.

The standard offering is nice to have;but there are few options to drill down. Ready-made dashboards are built with set questions in mind.As soon as another question comes up that hasn’t been pre-planned (i.e. built-in) the dashboard’s limits are reached. This often leads to frustration, as questions arising from the dashboard can’t be answered with the data at hand.

So, what are travel managers looking for to give employees a good travel experience that also works with finance, HR and security?