Carlson Wagonlit Travel (CWT) has launched CWT Travel Consolidator, an analytics tool that captures an organisation’s travel and expense spend.
The web-based platform combines air, hotel and ground transport transactions booked through CWT with a credit card, expense and HR data. CWT says the data collected helps businesses identify the ‘hidden costs’ of travel and off-channel spend, enabling travel managers to spot savings opportunities, improve compliance and increase the company’s negotiating power with suppliers.
CWT says the tool’s algorithms consolidate, standardise and clean up the data, saving travel managers the time of having to fix inaccuracies. Data is displayed on a single platform with configurable dashboards and reporting capabilities.
In addition, integrated data provides information on spend outside of official channels, such as flights and hotels booked on personal cards, as well as ancillary purchases such as airline seat selection charges, meals, laundry and other incidentals. CWT Travel Consolidator attaches these costs to the trips and travellers who incurred them.
Costs can then be cut, reported and analysed by trip, cost centre, organisational structure, route, on or off-channel and supplier.
Christophe Renard, vice president of CWT Solutions Group, commented: “Gathering, matching and reconciling travel and expense data is challenging and it’s often hard to get the full picture of the total cost of a trip. CWT Travel Consolidator gives you that visibility – and can save up to 7 per cent on travel costs.”
A CWT-sponsored survey by the GBTA Foundation found 64 per cent of travel managers feel they don’t have enough data to calculate the total cost of a trip. Seventy-three per cent struggle to reconcile differences in reports due to data formatting, while 58 per cent said they spend too much time reconciling and cleaning data.
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