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Data is an increasingly important tool for travel buyers, helping them to develop their travel programmes, including boosting supplier negotiations, improving policy compliance and optimising travel spend.
This is according to a new travel buyer survey from BCD Travel, which looked at the significance of travel data and data analytics and explored the ways travel buyers can interact with data to improve their travel programmes. The survey featured responses from just under 200 travel buyers from around the world in industries including manufacturing, life sciences and financial services. Key findings from the survey include:
Savings and cost control top the list of travel programme priorities
When it comes to programme priorities, travel buyers list savings and cost control (94%) as extremely or very important, with policy compliance (90%) and duty of care (86%) in second and third place. Data analytics and business intelligence were also highly rated as a travel programme priority: 82% of those surveyed consider this extremely or very important.
Data is key for identifying cost savings
The survey found that data adds value to travel programmes in different ways. Travel data brings particular value when it comes to negotiating with vendors (65%), improving compliance (59%) and optimising spend (57%). Just over half (52%) said data is essential for reporting and auditing and 46% cited budget forecasting.
Collaboration and quality are top data priorities
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%)
Interaction with travel data could be improved
While 60% of those surveyed regularly check their dashboards and analyse new data, 40% interact with travel data only when absolutely needed. Lack of time (44%) was the main reason for infrequent interaction with data, with a third (34%) saying there’s no need to work with data more often, while 18% said it isn’t part of their job. There were regional differences observed with data interaction. Those in Asia, Africa, Middle East and Latin America were seen as ‘laggards’, with those in Australia ‘average performers’ and those in North America and Europe seen as ‘leaders’.
Top travel data sources start with TMCs
TMCs are a major source of travel data for most travel buyers (89%), while around two-thirds collect and analyse data from payment and expense solutions and online booking tools, and 58% turn to travel suppliers.