BCD Travel surveyed 197 travel buyers from around the world in top industries including manufacturing, life sciences and financial services. The majority of travel buyers surveyed work for large companies with over 10,000 employees; ​48% have global responsibilities, and 41% report to procurement. ​The results clearly reflect the importance of using data as a tool to develop their travel programs, including boosting supplier negotiations, improving policy compliance and optimizing travel spend.

Priorities

When it comes to program priorities, travel buyers list savings and cost control (94%) as extremely or very important. Policy compliance (90%) and duty of care (86%) followed. Data analytics and business intelligence were also highly rated: 82% consider this extremely or very important.

The top two data-related priorities include enhancing collaboration with TMCs and travel suppliers around data collection and analysis (48%) and improving data quality (47%). This is followed by consolidating data from different sources (44%), enhancing data analysis (42%), acting on insights (36%) and streamlining data collection (33%).

The value of data

Indeed, data adds value to travel programs, albeit in different ways. Travel data brings particular value when it comes to negotiating with vendors (65%), improving compliance (59%) and optimizing spend (57%).

Challenges

Collecting data for data’s sake isn’t the goal. Rather, understanding the story that data reveals, and turning it into actionable insights, is. Half of the participants struggle with using data proactively versus reactively. This is a significant opportunity for improvement since data can reveal areas for cost savings, traveler behavior trends, and out of policy bookings.

BCD captures valuable data from the moment a traveler engages with the TMC. Its configurable technology platform collects, standardizes, normalizes, enriches and shares that data with customers – giving them complete control over their data in real time. APIs allow clients more customization to power their own solutions for traveler security, internet security, sustainability, and more. BCD also uses program travel data with messaging capabilities to influence traveler decisions. This can be used to address policy compliance throughout the trip and remind travelers of key benefits and inclusions, preventing unnecessary purchases like car insurance when it’s already included.

Further highlights of the report include:

• Most travel buyers regularly dedicate time to working with travel data. Whereas 74% of respondents have the skills and experience needed to interact with data, 56% prefer to leave working with data to professionals.
• Although 60% regularly check their dashboards and analyze new data, 40% interact with travel data only when absolutely needed. Lack of time (44%) was the main reason for infrequent interaction with data.
• TMCs are a major source of travel data for most travel buyers (89%). Respondents report payment and expense solutions (69%) and online booking tools (66%) as their top external data sources. Two in 10 use external data aggregators or consultants.
• Only one out of 10 use AI to collect, analyze and report travel data. The main reason for employing AI is to save time.
• Travel buyers consider real-time analytics that allows spotting trends (64%) as the most valuable feature of data analytic tools, followed by built-in dashboards (57%).

“BCD Travel is capturing more data from more sources than ever before,” says Heather Wright, BCD’s vice president, Digital Strategy & Advancement. “We invest heavily in the consolidation, standardization and normalization of this data, ensuring the most accurate, quality data is provided back to our customers. We deliver this data through a variety of unique solutions that allow our customers to make decisions in real time.”

To view the full data survey report, click here.