management pricing model and both of those things are dynamic.” HRG Insight is a data delivery tool that collects data from pre- trip to post-trip, and allows clients to access their global data anytime and reconfigure it as desired. Pancaldi continues: “We used to give clients
just raw data. Now we give more relevant and specific information on which we would already have done analysis, so we’re going to them with trends and opportunities in various scenarios. We’re working with customers to build models for everything spent on a trip.” But air and transport data has moved
from the sufficient to the necessary-but-not- sufficient. Pancaldi says: “In an ideal world you wouldn’t look just at spend with suppliers but total T&E [travel and entertainment] expen- diture and return on investment of individual trips. To get that you need more than a TMC, so how do you bring together travel, card and expense data? It’s not mainstream at the moment but is something people are looking at and working towards.” The tactics are changing but, as Pilcher
says, the travel manager’s aim is constant: “We look for a product that keeps travellers happy and fit for purpose in a way that achieves our cost objectives.” And Choe reminds us that corporate ob- jectives are not uniform. “For some clients the focus is not on savings at all but how to improve the traveller experience,” he says. Travelport vice-president Reg Warlop
agrees that what happens with the data depends on the customers’ objectives. He believes that corporates need benchmarking, personalisation, advice and recommenda- tions – useful for a first-time visitor to a city. Warlop urges all corporate buyers to
“gain access to your own data, not just MI reports but the whole data. Understand what is available in real-time rather than once a month, and probe much deeper.” Data is also not just about buyers and sellers. “The first step is for travellers to have control of ‘what people see about me’ – which is now rarely the case,” he says.
So slick data management need not be the preserve only of suppliers but, as Susan Hopley tells us, “they are becoming increasingly successful at understanding and marketing to individual travellers”. Keesup Choe sums up the challenge very neatly when he says: “I can’t think of any sector where the disparity of investment is so large between the sales side and the buying side.” Perhaps the time may just have come for collective action.
BUYINGBUSINESSTRAVEL.COM BBT MAY/JUNE 2014 47
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