We all love anthems. Those rousing songs expressing our ideals and ambitions: national anthems, football (even FIFA's) anthems, anthems for a generation. "We'll meet again" from Vera Lynne during the war years, The Rolling Stone's "Can't get no satisfaction" during the sixties. Lately, Big Data has been singing its own anthem; Queen's "I want it all [and I want it now]" comes to mind.
We hear travel managers asking for, and managing, credit card data, agency data, social media data, airline data, hotel data, expensive reporting data, department data, exception reporting data, health and safety data, HR data…the list goes on. The struggle to acquire this data focuses on the accuracy, timeliness and completeness of the data.
Fair enough. But is all this data necessary, at least at a granular level? How will the impact of the emerging use of Big Data affect the travel industry and travel managers in particular? What is on the horizon when we ask the question: what data will we really need and what won't we have to bother with? What will this emerging landscape look like? How fast will these changes take place?
The business information cycle
Let's go back a bit to understand where we are in the bundle/unbundle cycle of travel business information (BI). In the very early days agencies provided reporting tools. Over time these proved to be insufficiently comprehensive, as new approaches and new technologies emerged. Savvy buyers unbundled the BI and moved to outside specialised suppliers and consultants. The agencies responded, went back to the drawing board and re-engineered their BI solutions. Many of the start-up companies carry on but most remain niche or have morphed, the prime example being Concur.
Over time, the result of the agencies increased focus on BI investment the cycle repeated itself. BI became bundled again as an integral part of the TMC offering. The pricing was bundled as well with data being considered as part of a transaction. License fees became popular and all seemed well with the world.
Business information is coming from all types of new and changing channels. © DrAfter123/iStock
Now, however, the cycle has moved on again and 'unbundling' is emerging. There is new and exciting stuff out there and agency BI specialists recognise this. Peruse many an agency offering document and therein is information about the heavy investment they are making in re-tooling their BI solutions, in an effort to stay ahead of the curve and keep their offerings bundled. Add all this investment up across these companies and see if you are still standing. It is staggering. Is it worth it? Is it necessary? Is it the best approach or are we ready for another era of unbundling? Back to the question about the emerging landscape of travel BI.
Decision making at another level
Each of the three aspects of the BI solutions, the data itself, its visualisation and the decision making that comes from it, are being catapulted by technologies successful in other industry verticals. Yet again, we stand on the brink of exciting times and opportunities.
Forget the data for a minute. Consider visualisation tools. There are a host of suitable and well-proven solutions out there for BI developers in the travel vertical; Pentaho, Tableau, MoData name only a very few. These solutions are scalable, cost efficient, and again offer unbundled opportunities for the corporate buyer. Certain large corporates report they are using these tools independently of their TMC to build their own analytics. Often these tools are used across a corporation so it is far easier to mash, for example, sales data with forecast data to build even bigger cloud-based data sets. This unbundled approach liberates access to Big Data in ways one vertical alone, namely travel, cannot.
It is access to this mashed cloud-based data that will totally change the reporting landscape as it is seen now, no matter how many feeds an agency takes. Barricade against it as best you can, the battlements will not hold.
First, consider new decision-making tools in the generalist market. Customers like the visualisation tools that have been provided by travel management companies because they enable better decision-making. However, decision making, which at its foundation aims to make wise purchasing decisions based on pricing, health and safety and ROI among other factors, is becoming unbundled as well as the new, unbundled technologies become mainstream.
These new Big Data initiatives take decision to another level entirely. The expertise of these outsourced companies lies in their sophisticated machine learning solutions. These tools will not be developed, at this stage, by travel agencies. They require enormous investment and will further sustain the unbundling trend currently underway. They will either be outsourced by the agencies and incorporated, or the companies will deploy solutions used in other areas of their organisations.
So we return to the questions about the emerging landscape of travel BI. Instead of handling multiple data sources travel managers will find themselves handling tools from a few suppliers, or at least selecting them. They will need to be educated about the strengths and weaknesses of what a BI tool looks like but also how comprehensive is it. Once they are selected and implemented they will spend less time worrying about the data.
Machine learning will enable travel policies to be customised, even to the individual level. In a scenario where a traveller misses their flight but closed the deal, the company could upgrade them or send a car to take them home to their family when they arrive from the re-booked flight. All the travel manager needs to do is press 'accept'.
Machine learning will tell travel managers at the time of action if the price is right, based on a plethora of parameters only imagined now. For example is this the right time to book or, based on Big Data, will the airline release capacity at a lower price in five minutes or perhaps five days? How will such a purchase as this affect contracts or how the sale goes etc.? Decisions won't be retrospective or prospective; they will be moment-specific and justifiable.
Expect a learning curve, those exciting times of experimentation. Yet the win for organisations that embrace this emerging approach to travel management will reap rewards as never before possible. These rewards will be in savings, employee loyalty and a far better use of time. As decision making becomes quicker and easier a new anthem may be sung. The data we used to struggle will be, "Dust in the Wind".