A new global survey by BCD Travel reveals that leveraging data is paramount for travel buyers in developing their programmes, particularly for boosting supplier negotiations, improving policy compliance, and optimising travel spend.

The survey polled 197 travel buyers from various top industries including manufacturing, life sciences, and financial services. The majority of respondents work for large corporations with over 10,000 employees, with 48% holding global responsibilities and 41% reporting directly to procurement departments.

When it comes to programme priorities, travel buyers list savings and cost control (94%) as extremely or very important. Policy compliance (90%) and duty of care (86%) followed. Data analytics and business intelligence were also highly rated: 82% consider this extremely or very important.

The top two data-related priorities include enhancing collaboration with TMCs and travel suppliers around data collection and analysis (48%) and improving data quality (47%). This is followed by consolidating data from different sources (44%), enhancing data analysis (42%), acting on insights (36%), and streamlining data collection (33%).

Indeed, data adds value to travel programmes, albeit in different ways. Travel data brings particular value when it comes to negotiating with vendors (65%), improving compliance (59%) and optimising spend (57%).

Collecting data for data’s sake is not the goal. Rather, understanding the story that data reveals, and turning it into actionable insights, is.

Half of the participants struggle with using data proactively versus reactively. This is a significant opportunity for improvement since data can reveal areas for cost savings, traveller behaviour trends, and out of policy bookings.

Further highlights of the report include:

Most travel buyers regularly dedicate time to working with travel data. Whereas 74% of respondents have the skills and experience needed to interact with data, 56% prefer to leave working with data to professionals.

Although 60% regularly check their dashboards and analyse new data, 40% interact with travel data only when absolutely needed. Lack of time (44%) was the main reason for infrequent interaction with data.

TMCs are a major source of travel data for most travel buyers (89%). Respondents report payment and expense solutions (69%) and online booking tools (66%) as their top external data sources. Two in 10 use external data aggregators or consultants.

Only one out of 10 use AI to collect, analyse and report travel data. The main reason for employing AI is to save time.

Travel buyers consider real-time analytics that allows spotting trends (64%) as the most valuable feature of data analytic tools, followed by built-in dashboards (57%).