Typically, airlines, hotels and car rental companies provide
corporates with quarterly or yearly PDFs or PowerPoint reports that may come
with face-to-face meetings, depending on the size of the corporation.
Pros & Cons: Travel managers can reconcile
supplier data with data sets from other sources, such as expense, to manage
contracts. There can be discrepancies between suppliers’ and buyers’ data.
Suppliers classify and account for value in different ways. This makes it
difficult to find consistency and derive true spend. The value of the data also
depends on the corporation’s spend volume with that supplier.
Access/Format: Aside from standard reports, buyers
should demand raw data from suppliers, which may require some negotiating or
come with a fee.
Air: Airline
data may include values for soft and hard savings and services. Pay close
attention to whether those include items retail consumers would receive via
status and irrespective of negotiated contracts, such as free checked bags. The
data may not always separate ancillaries, and the data is not always timely.
Delta has introduced Delta Edge, an airline analytics tool specifically for
corporate customers.
Hotel: Travel
managers can get visibility into year-over-year spend, average daily rate and
whether their company is getting the contracted rates. Corporations covet folio
data, which includes guest name, total spend, nightly rate and dates of the
stay, but it’s challenging to get. Most companies rely on expense reports for
this detail, but travelers’ manual entry into expense reports makes it
inconsistent. Hotel identifiers pose a challenge, as well, in that property
names change frequently or are not mapped consistently to all systems.
Car
Rental: Car
data tends to be richer than other supplier types, particularly for ancillary
fees and services. Some car rental suppliers provide data analytics portals to
view spend.