Leisure travel stories don't dominate business travel news. But they often indicate a direction of travel.
This week there was a big story from CWT but the future trend might have been flagged by a small Melbourne-based company named Travlr.
Carlson Wagonlit has launched CWT Travel Consolidator, an analytics tool which captures every part of an organisation's travel and expense spend. The web-based platform can combine air, hotel and ground transport transactions booked through the TMC with credit card, expense and HR data.
It aims to reveal "the hidden costs of business travel and off-channel spend, enabling travel managers to identify missed savings opportunities, improve compliance and increase organisations' negotiating power with suppliers".
Integrated data such as this provides valuable data on travel spending outside the approved channels such as flights and hotels booked on personal cards, airline seat selection charges, meals, and incidentals.
The new tool comes complete with all the bells, whistles and flexibility necessary to cut and slice to any travel manager's delight. With all card, travel and expense data in one place costs can be assigned to specific trips and travellers so that they can be analysed in terms of department, project, supplier, approved channels and non-official channels.
It sounds like any travel manager's dream.
But is that dream the same as Nirvana?
No matter how comprehensive and slick such data reporting tools are, they can only report and analyse historical behaviour, ie what has happened in the past.
A platform called Travlr this week signed a deal with Amadeus to provide it with inventory. As a major GDS it is Amadeus's job is to provide inventory so no surprises there.
The development is that Travlr may be a one-stop travel shop but it is not just another OTA. While suppliers are going down the route of dynamic pricing, this travel company is going down the route of dynamic demand — personalising the supply to the buyer.
Amadeus is also providing the technology for the personalisation on the site which means historical data and intelligence can be shuffled to prioritise content which suits the traveller, albeit a leisure one.
Travlr's business model also relies heavily on user-generated content to get "inspiration from like-minded travellers" to target preferences.
Substitute leisure traveller with business traveller, overlay a travel policy and you can begin to see why this might be of interest.
In a corporate travel scenario that might translate to an online portal which also encompasses a closed-user group where reviews and tips about destinations, properties, airports, transfers are shared so that similar travellers — rather than travellers in general — are directed towards what might suit them. Could the universal travel policy soon be obsolete?
The past has always been a good, simple indicator of what might happen in the future. But a repeat of the past may not be what you want.
Management is about goals as well as tactics.