CONSUMER DATA
happens, something we’re trying to combat by pulling together all our rates properly into the GDS and mandating their use in the future.” For Linley-Munro, the answer is working
more closely with the company’s travel bookers and not trying to capture all the data through an expense management system. “I think our saving grace when it comes to hotel leakage within our programme is that it’s coming from a handful of our own travel bookers, as opposed to hordes of our travellers, and therefore should be easier to crack down on,” she says. Expense management provider SAP Concur’s answer to combatting this trend is Trip Link, its solution aimed at tracking “rogue” spend. This allows employees to link their accounts with partner airlines, hotels and taxi companies so these bookings are automatically passed into the expense management system. Partners currently include Airbnb, Hotel Tonight, Interconti- nental Hotels Group and Trainline Europe. Chris Baker, managing director for the
The air category has traditionally been the largest chunk of most companies’ travel programmes and, inevitably, buyers typi- cally spend the largest proportion of their time on this area because it has had the po- tential to deliver the biggest returns. Yet the changes in the travel industry
W
that saw airline commissions reduced to zero in most cases and the legacy airlines stripped of large parts of their short-haul businesses by low-cost carriers means that potential savings are dwindling. This has forced many buyers to look at secondary spend on things such as hotels and food and beverage to continue to keep the finance director happy.
QUALITY DATA But the ability to take control of spend in these areas is being hampered by two things – data and consumerisation. Data, or more specifically quality data, is often hard to come by.
BUYINGBUSINESSTRAVEL.COM Mark Avery, global business services and
HEN THE AIRLINE deals are done, where does the cost-conscious travel manager go next?
travel leader at Price Waterhouse Coopers (PWC), says: “All sources of data can be valuable. The key is the quality of data available, whether inputted through the expense process, received via card feeds, TMC or supplier. We all have reams of data but if unstructured, it can be next to useless.” Coupled with this issue is the rise of
consumerisation, which has seen business travellers increasingly tempted away from preferred channels to the apps and websites they use in their personal lives and which are often seen as being more user-friendly and – dare we say – exciting. This has led to increased fragmentation
in spend categories which were already badly fragmented. Take hotels, which can be a particularly gnarly problem for many companies to get a grip on. Alice Linley-Munro, global travel analyst
of Oil Spill Response, says: “In some of our smaller locations (our South African base, for example) we have 100 per cent leakage, although they have an almost non-existent travel spend to begin with. It is our four small offices where the leakage
UK, Ireland, Nordics, Middle East and Africa at SAP Concur, admits many Trip Link partners are US-focused, but says the company is “now seeing movement from suppliers within Europe”, particularly with the company now under European ownership. SAP Concur says connections to British Airways, HRS and Lufthansa will be coming soon. Trip Link also allows users to forward confirmation emails from non-partner suppliers and the information is collected from the email and is used to populate the expense claim.
Booking.com is a particularly popular
Trip Link partner for corporates. Baker adds: “People love
Booking.com; it’s simple and is a really good consumer-style site. Why not make that available to your corporate traveller with the safety net of Trip Link?” Expense reporting does potentially have
some advantages for gathering data from non-traditional areas of spend. One example is where an airline stops providing meals as part of its service. If busi- ness travellers do not want to pay for meals in-flight they start to expense their pre-flight purchases at, say, Pret a Manger or Gordon Ramsay Plane Food at Heathrow, adding significantly to the total cost of short trips. Baker says travel buyers are telling his
team: “My traveller is spending more, the airline is costing me more money because
BBT March/April 2018 59
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