Travel Optimisation Management Vol. 2: Optimising Travel Data

We’ll cover what travel data actually is, where it originates, and some of the main challenges in analysing it. Then, we’ll discuss what optimisation means in this space and look at strategies and tools to make it work for organisations of all sizes. 

What is Travel Data? 

Let’s clarify some basics. Travel data, in this context, primarily refers to information related to business trips. For an organisation, it’s a comprehensive summary of business travel activities. While it sounds simple, compiling and analysing relevant travel data requires a clear understanding of what a “business trip” comprises. 

Consider a typical trip: an international 2-night conference visit with additional meetings in a nearby city. This one trip might include: 

• 2 flights (different airlines) 
• 1 hotel stay 
• 1 domestic train booking 
• 2 domestic taxi rides 
• 2 international train tickets 
• 4 international taxi rides 
• 1 international car rental 
• Numerous expenses 

This trip involves at least thirteen separate bookings, each one contributing unique data points. Let’s explore how these bookings are typically managed and what this means for data collection and integration. 

How Travel Data is Managed and Where Challenges Arise 

In most companies, bookings and approvals follow a variety of paths. Flights might be booked through an airline website, an online agent, or a travel management company (TMC). Accommodations are often booked just days in advance, sometimes outside the program using third-party booking sites. Rail tickets, domestic and international, may be bought online, through an agent, or locally. Ground transport is often booked as needed, sometimes managed by the TMC or platforms like Jyrney, or Mobility IQ, but not always integrated with the main program. 

This fragmented booking process impacts data collection. If a TMC is in place, they may provide booking data, accessible through an API or reporting tools—but typically, TMCs can only report on bookings they handled. Expense and credit card data are additional sources, but each has its limitations, and aligning all data to create a clear trip summary is complex. 

Who Uses Travel Data? 

Travel data is used across departments, including Finance, Procurement, Security, HR, and Sustainability.  Trip Stax, Travelogix, Power BI, PredictX, and Unlocked Data offer tools to support the travel data process. Yet even with these tools, fully optimising travel data requires a holistic approach that considers the needs of all stakeholders and converts raw data into actionable insights. 

Summarising Key Points 

• Companies want to measure the ROI of business trips, manage and mitigate travel risk, and have clear data to guide decision-making. 
• Business trips involve multiple components booked through various platforms, both in advance and during the trip. 
• Travel data arrives in fragmented formats from different sources and needs cleaning, normalisation, and integration to have real value. 

Despite our best efforts, travel data today is still piecemeal and reactive. Optimisation means taking a proactive approach: it’s not enough to rely on the partial data provided by TMCs; instead, we must define what data we truly need and find ways to capture it fully. 

With optimised data, the potential benefits are substantial. It can empower decisions and responses to queries across Tax and Immigration, Travel Management, Carbon Reporting (including Scope 3), Traveller security and assistance, wellbeing, budgeting and more.   

Travel data is the key to everything; the tools that we are most impressed with right now are Voyage Manager and its sister company for SMEs Mia Bazo.  They are part of the TRA Technology community which will be sharing its aims and objectives across the industry at TOMS25.