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. Continue reading
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? Continue reading
** Update: The original webcast is no longer available. Here’s the portion of the webcast that I presented. It gives a few examples of anlyses that have some element of added value in them:
What the heck does baking have to do with travel data reporting, you ask?
It makes for an interesting metaphor. I used this concept in the speech I gave at the ACTE Canada conference this week in Toronto. I’ll admit that the skit was a bit hokey, but the points about poor preparation of data, half-baked analysis and hanging Christmas lights on plain-jane data were too good to pass up.
Once I got beyond these process-related problems, we dived into Continue reading
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.
As promised, here’s more on the story of hotel clusters and why it’s so relevant to your hotel sourcing efforts. The link above takes you to the must-read Procurement.travel‘s online site, where you’ll get an in-depth look at what clusters are and how they can be used to make your hotel sourcing life easier and more effective. For a handle on the key concepts behind clustering, see this post. In short, hotel clustering’s main benefits are:
Those bright boys and girls at TRX Travel Analytics (TTA) are breaking new ground in the hotel sourcing arena. More on that topic after NBTA, for sure.
Innovative ideas require new ways of describing things, right? Here are some ways that TTA describes the hotels that are – or could be – part of a buyer’s hotel travel program. Continue reading
Gillespie's Guide to Travel Innovation 