Stairsteps to Data Heaven

Why is it so damned hard to get great value from the sea of travel data out there?

You’d think that corporate travel, a large and mature industry, would have cracked the code by now. And yet most buyers are still struggling to get anything more than mediocre value from their data reporting tools.

Top Reads from 1st Quarter 2010

Last quarter’s most popular topics covered travel ROI, savings, metrics and reverse auctions:

ROI on Travel and Meetings – Why Bother? – challenges the feasibility of placing ROI metrics on trips; says there is a “good enough” alternative.  It’s called management.

The Real Question Behind Travel ROI – searching for post-trip ROI is a long walk in the hot sun.  Far better to focus on this essential question: “What’s the most effective way to achieve my goal?” Sabre and Cisco showed an interesting approach.

Travel Benchmarking Done Well – the Travel GPA tool focuses on actionable benchmarks – stuff that travel managers really need to pay attention to.

Savings Metrics, Rat Farms and KPIs Gone Bad – takes a critical look at three common definitions of savings, and the unintended consequences of each.

Reverse Auctions for Hotels and Car Rates? – wonders if travel suppliers may offer more reverse auctions for their inventory, and the implications for buyers, TMCs and GDSs.

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Travel Benchmarking Done Well

Benchmarking is one of the most popular requests from travel managers – and one of the most difficult services to provide.  I’ve argued strongly that price benchmarking is wrong and worthless.  Not changing my tune on that one.

Performance benchmarking, however, has a big part to play in any up-and-coming travel program.  The problem

ROI on Travel and Meetings – Why Bother?

Have you noticed a surge of interest in measuring ROI on travel and meeting (T&M) spend?  I’ll get right to the point.  Trying to measure the return on travel or meeting spend is not worth the effort.

It’s like taking a long walk in the desert with a crappy map.  You wouldn’t do it by choice.

I get why suppliers, lobbyists and trade associations want to link spending with a positive economic return, especially in these harsh financial times.  I get why buyers would like some way to measure the ROI of their travel budgets.  And I like numbers  and metrics and quantifying stuff more than most people…so why don’t I like this quest to measure travel ROI?

It’s Impractical

Savings Metrics, Rat Farms and KPIs Gone Bad

Decades ago, goes the story*,  the French colonialists grew tired of the rat population in Hanoi.  So the French offered a bounty on dead rats.  What happened?  The industrious Vietnamese began raising rats.

Therein lies the trouble with metrics.  Be careful what you measure.  And what metric is more important than savings in the procurement world?

You’d think that such a basic word as savings would have a pretty well-agreed definition – especially when the S word is the focal point of just about every RFP process.  Unfortunately, there are very big differences in how buyers define and measure savings.  Let’s have a look at the slightly satirical implications for travel procurement.

Naked Airfares: Price, Quality and Value Revealed

Here’s a great way to see the full value picture when your travelers are shopping for airfares:

InsideTrip calculates a trip quality score for each flight that you’re considering. It factors in a dozen elements covering the itinerary’s speed, comfort and ease.  Even better, travelers can select only those factors that matter to them.

See the big numbers on the right-side of the web page?  Those are the TripQuality scores.  You can use them to sort your flight options, or sort by price, departure time, etc.

This site is, to my knowledge, the first to factor in the quality dimension of airfare purchases.  With price and a quality score, it is now much easier to see differentiated value.