your mind: there are now estimated to be more pieces of digital content – emails, tweets, Facebook comments and instagrams, for example – than there are grains of sand on every beach on earth. I know, it's incredible. Now consider that a good chunk of that
H
content will be concerned with travel – whether it’s a tweet about preferring Delta to American, an email about Starwood’s meetings offering or a blog about Hertz' Gold Plus reward scheme. At this point, if you’re a travel manager
reading this, you are either groaning at the enormity of your task of how best to orchestrate your managed travel policy or you are feeling excited about the possibilities that all this information, now known as Big Data, hands you. Either way, it’s not easy keeping on top of what your travellers are doing, with legacy data being intrinsically flawed. As Keesup Choe, CEO at data analyst
company PI, explains: “Travel data has challenges like coding inconsistencies (air
ow about this for a piece of data to blow
fare basis codes etc) and parent/ child aggregations (hotels
versus hotel chains). Also, as the TMCs have not agreed on a
common data coding standard, if the buying organisation has multiple TMCs this can be a barrier to performing inte-grated analysis across all travel activities. Choe continues, “But even with these challenges, the underlying problem is that the systems used by TMCs to understand travel are not designed to help them answer all of the 'w' questions, especially who and why as sometimes this information is lost in the aggregation.” Little wonder that buyers are daunted by
the prospect of working their way through the maze of Big Data – the trillions of digital breadcrumbs left by travellers.
“ Looking at how TMCs work right now, Big Data could help
select travel options. The trick is to amalgamate and include non-traditional sources of data
70 THE BUSINESS TRAVEL MAGAZINE ”
Struggling to keep up Torsten Kriedt, vice president, product planning and corporate intelligence at BCD, paints a picture of the typical buyer thus: “Most travel managers are still struggling to get a full view of their total travel spend. Even in the important category of hotel spend many don’t know details for more than 50 per cent of their spend. “The picture is even worse when it comes
to blending different data sources together in order to understand the total cost of a single trip. Matching those different sources together requires some sophisticated logic that is quite costly and not used yet with many travel managers,” says Kriedt. So for many travel managers, problems
already exist in harnessing together all the right data. Now, Big Data looms – and that nagging feeling that really we should be on board that bus by now. Well, should you? “Absolutely”, says Susan Hopley, who runs
the Data Exchange, a company set up to draw together disparate companies’ data and allow them to buy and sell each others’ intelligence. “The travel industry has a reputation for being rooted in past practices. We have settled for poor quality data, often accepting the idea that it is technically too
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