Air fare and hotel price tracking provider Yapta has announced the commercial release of its TravelAI hotel analytics platform.
The tool utilises a combination of real-time hotel availability data and machine learning to identify areas of focus where companies can create or improve opportunities to save.
Yapta says TravelAI delivers actionable insight into supplier utilisation and performance, contract rate performance and travel policy effectiveness. It also aggregates anonymous hotel pricing data across the ‘millions’ of travel itineraries tracked by Yapta to allow travel managers to benchmark their programme by spend amount, geography, industry and supplier.
The company also claims TravelAI brings greater transparency to booking data, providing customers with point-of-sale data from the actual booking, helping travel managers gain visibility into rate availability and attainment.
Valerie Layman, chief product and services officer at Yapta, commented: “Travel managers are demanding insights that are prescriptive and actionable. TravelAI highlights exactly where the contract rate and policy breakage occurs and allows issues to be addressed immediately. Because the solution examines all available rates at the time of booking, it provides travel managers with clear guidance on whether a traveller made a decision to book a higher rate or premium room type when a standard contract room rate is available or if the supplier is not performing.”
Yapta says customers participating in the TravelAI early adopter programme have utilised the solution to measure the competitiveness of their contracted rates by comparing them to booked rates, pricing benchmarks and the best available rates.
Jeff Daily, director of global travel at Sanmina, said: “With the added visibility of all available rates and the ability to validate booked rates and lower rates that may become available against our corporate negotiated rates, we are now more confident when determining whether our suppliers are performing as contracted – and we have a better feel for how well our travellers are complying with policy. TravelAI is helping us easily identify which rate types and which properties best support our travel programme, our strategies and can assist in influencing traveller behaviour.”
Yapta CEO James Filsinger added: “TravelAI is quite literally transforming the way contracted travel spend gets managed and sourced. Travel buyers can now have the confidence that they are sourcing with the right suppliers, at the right rates, in the right markets – all while having Yapta’s price assurance tools working in the background.”
In addition to 24/7 web portal access, TravelAI hotel analytics is available as an app, bundled with the Tableau platform currently available via the App Store. Yapta says it plans to commercially roll out the platform in the second quarter of 2019.
Yapta will be at the Business Travel Show on stand B1107.
yapta.com/travelai