COVID-19 impacted many companies' bottom lines, which caused travel managers to search for innovative ways to reduce spend without sacrificing corporate travel program necessities While the need is less urgent now, it's never a bad idea to find ways to make better use of your travel budget.
To introduce flexibility and reap additional savings, more travel managers are adopting a hybrid program model that allows travelers to book either via the preferred TMC or directly with suppliers. Permitting these supplier-direct bookings allows organizations to capitalize on promotions and savings that are offered outside of the traditional TMC and negotiated supplier contracts. Supplier-direct bookings also avoid the TMC transaction and support fees, which can be unnecessarily costly for simple trips (e.g., basic round-trip flight and a night or two in a hotel).
Regardless of the path you’re exploring, pre-trip itinerary reports from Traxo can provide you with insight into your travelers’ forecasted spend before travel occurs, so you can course-correct non-compliant purchases, like changing that 4-star hotel to a more budget-friendly property, for example.
Data is a powerful business tool managers use to inform strategic business and spend management decisions, including budgetary cuts. Travel program blindspots – also known as leakage – make thorough analysis impossible. Traxo’s ability to capture pre-trip, off-channel booking data uncovers spend that has historically only been captured through expense reports after trips occur. Without pre-trip data visibility, that hidden spend is unmanageable and unaddressable.
You can impose strict warnings, policy violation notices, and re-education after trips happen, but at this stage, you’ve already forfeited your opportunity to course-correct spend decisions. And as we’ve seen, this post-trip “stick” hasn’t had any meaningful impact on improving compliance or recouping cost savings — leakage is as bad as it has always been. Fortunately, this also means that capturing the data and putting it to use will produce business travel savings.
In a traditionally managed travel program, spend is captured through a preferred TMC, credit card program, and expense report data, which results in a time-consuming monthly endeavor to consolidate and analyze incomplete data sets. Not to mention that this can also lead to substantial increases in leakage on air, hotel, and car spend.
Implementing a business travel data capture tool like Traxo allows you to capture all pre-trip itinerary data, eliminating the guesswork commonly applied to supplier negotiations, spend management decisions, and risk management. Essentially, Traxo enables you to manage travel costs in a more effective way, which makes it easier to realize business travel savings.
Real-time data capture enables full visibility on program leakage (off-channel bookings), which has previously been tolerated by travel managers as an unavoidable headache.
Let us explore some potential areas of savings opportunities powered by comprehensive travel data:
The existing rationale for only capturing data from approved channels should no longer hinder your program’s success. With Traxo’s capabilities, you can capture data and manage your program better than ever before by:
Modern travel programs are those that embrace both TMC and non-TMC bookings. Are you ready to access complete data visibility, manage previously unknown off-channel spend, identify new savings opportunities and correct non-compliant bookings before trips occur? Learn more about our platform and how we can help you to secure business travel savings, or watch our webinar, Solving the Data Puzzle with Grasp and Traxo, to get a better idea of what Traxo can do for you.