Travel Buyers, What’s Your Big Analytical Pain Point?

A lot of folks in the travel industry don’t enjoy the numbers side of the business nearly as much as they do the people side.  Fair enough, as the whole industry is built on the premise of building better interpersonal relationships.

But what is it about the analytical efforts that are really causing you the most pain?

Maybe if we understood those pain points better, our industry could do a better job of making the numbers side a bit easier on everyone.

If you are a travel buyer, please take 2 minutes to answer five quick questions here:

Travel Buyers: This Quarter’s Travel Data Pain Points?

The survey is anonymous, and meant to shed some directional light on the problems.

I’ll publish the results here and on LinkedIn.

Please share this as you see fit.  Thank you!

Travel Procurement Workshop at NBTA 2010

Yesterday I led a full-day workshop on travel procurement at NBTA’s annual conference.  We had a terrific group of about fifty folks participate.  About two-thirds came from travel backgrounds, and about a third came from the procurement side.  Lots of good interaction throughout the day.

Here are the slides that I used during the workshop.

Best Practice: Hotel Sourcing Strategy Study

We’re moving into the hotel sourcing season, so take a moment and think about your favorite little black dress or your best power suit.  What makes it your favorite? And how the heck does this relate to hotel sourcing?

Great clothes project the image you want.  They send signals.  They help define your image.  And if you’ve chosen carefully, they help achieve your goals. But they’ll only do that if your clothes fit like a glove.  See where this is going?

Get a Fresh Look at Your Air Alliances

Continental Airlines will switch from the SkyTeam to the Star alliance later this month.  This will affect planeloads of frequent travelers, but what are the procurement implications?

The major issue is the extent to which each alliance’s capacity to serve your account will change. Buyers who use Continental significantly will want a fresh look at how well the Star Alliance (led by United, Lufthansa, Air Canada, Singapore Airlines and now Continental) can serve your travel footprint.  If you can put more spend with the Star Alliance, you may be able to get bigger savings. 

Deciding How to Decide

This post continues the thread “Why Travel Disses Procurement…And What To Do About It“. In that post I explained why procurement has a bad reputation among many (not all!) travel managers, and two steps that will help travel managers overcome this problem.  This post describes the third step.

Get Your Flu Shot

This third step is a lot like getting kids to take their flu shots. 

Meetings Analytics – A Much-needed Service

If your firm spends much on meetings and events, you should check out Meetings Analytics.  This young firm does the hard and messy work of gathering, scrubbing and analyzing corporate meeting data, and then analyzes it to identify practical savings opportunities.  You my think (or be told) that you already get meeting data reports from your meeting management tools or travel agencies.  Hah!  These guys are way ahead of those old-school reports.  They report their findings in these key areas:

Travel Data 101 (part 4): Travel Analytics

Today we’ll look at data reporting’s sexy cousin, analytics.  Well, “sexy” may be a stretch, but my point is that data reporting is not very interesting, while good analytics can make you say “Wow – look at that!”

Travel category managers can be overwhelmed by all the data available to them.  Data reporting tools are necessary, but they typically produce “dumb” data.  By dumb, I mean

Leveraging Travel Data: 3 Examples

The good folks at ITM hosted the education session “Sweating The Numbers”, in which three of us gave examples of how to leverage travel data.  The slides I presented are here.  They show how to progress from ordinary hotel data to actionable clusters.

James Westgarth, formerly Airbus‘s head of travel management, showed how he used a variety of travel data to pinpoint cost savings in expense reimbursements and airfare negotiations.

Charles Williams at PI Benchmarking showed how his firm’s data integration and reporting tool could be used to track compliance and identify high-cost non-compliant travelers.  You can see Charle’s set of slides here on ITM’s website, and listen to the audio recording of the speakers’ narration here.