At a forum of the Association of Corporate Travel Executives (ACTE) in London in May, a travel manager complained she was getting far too much MI from her travel management company (TMC).
Just as often, the reverse of that complaint is heard, that a client gets too little MI or worse, data that is irrelevant.
Getting the right MI, both is terms of quantity and quality, is essential to a cost controlled travel programme. Crucial to getting the right MI is what does the company need it for or, rather, plan to do with it.
If it is for use in leveraging better deals out of suppliers, comprehensive MI is needed. If it is for seeking opportunities to save money, very specific MI is required.
On the first, Pauline Tweedie, Carlson Wagonlit Travel's director global information and delivery management, said: “If you are talking about doing deals, you have to have absolutely every detail from the ticket and then get that information into a database.
“You need the routing, ticket class, obviously you need the fare. So from the ticket itself you take a lot of information. You have to do that not just on a one country basis. You might have to do that on a global basis. You could be talking about big clients and in about 80 countries.”
Such a worldwide operation means the TMC needs the means to collect all that information before it can be analysed. Without it, a company can not build up a worldwide picture of its spend on air travel and can not effectively negotiate a deal with a supplier.
Companies might also want MI to know who or which department is spending the money and that again is a different type of MI and presents different problems. “The critical point is understanding the cost centres and being able to capture the hierarchy within different clients,” Ms Tweedie said.
If the MI is for seeking opportunities to cut costs, once again the MI would be different. Robert Daykin, senior partner with consultants The Corporate Travel Partnership, said: “If you are looking into what sort of behaviour is going on in the business, the key word here is ‘meaningful' MI. Here the sort of stuff I see coming out of the agency is not meaningful enough.
“You are looking at a sheet of A4 paper with information, figures, graphs, pie charts which enables you to say ‘Here is an opportunity to do something and save money.'”
As an example, the MI could show who booked early and who booked late enabling the company to try and persuade the latter group to book early and therefore get cheaper tickets.
Similarly could people who booked flexible tickets but did not change them have bought restrictive tickets at a lower cost?
“The biggest problem is that companies say they have fantastic MI but when you look at it, part of it comes from the agent, part from the card company, part from the rail company, part from hotels. But it does not always tell you what type of ticket or who booked it. It is all over the place,” he said.
Mr Daykin said there were five main sources of MI: the agent's booking process, the GDSs which tell you what happened to the ticket after it was booked, e.g. was it changed, the company's corporate card programme, the expense system which reveals items that did not go through the TMC or the card, like sandwiches and coffees, and information from the vendors when bookings were made directly with them.
“You need to bring these together in a network computer environment where you are sucking in information and formatting it so the corporate has one central source of information which shows you your figures. You can analyse it and then report on it,” he said.
“But you have to know the questions to ask or you will end up with mountains and mountains of data.”
This is a point Ms Tweedie agrees on. “You can get too much but you need to discuss it with your account manager on what is needed.
“You have to ask ‘What do you need the MI for?' and then the TMC should be able to customise and package it for you.
“If you get the wrong MI, you are probably not going to lose money but it would not be good for policy adherence. It is really all about the quality of the MI and ‘Have you set up the right to get it from the start?' ” she said.