BCD Travel’s latest travel buyer report highlights the importance of leveraging travel data to meet and develop travel programme priorities. They also reflect the importance of using data to boost supplier negotiations, improve policy compliance and optimise travel-related spending. 

The report identifies the two top data-related priorities as enhancing collaboration with TMCs and travel suppliers relating to data collection and analysis (48%) and improving data quality (47%). 

Those are followed by consolidating data from different sources (44%), enhancing data analysis (42%), acting on insights (36%) and streamlining data collection (33%). 

The report is based on a survey of 197 travel buyers from around the world. The respondents come from industries including manufacturing, life sciences and financial services. 

The majority of travel buyers surveyed work for large companies with over 10,000 employees: 48% have global responsibilities and 41% report to procurement. ​ 

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. 

A further 82% consider data analytics and business intelligence as very or extremely important. 

Respondents identify that travel data brings value when negotiating with vendors (65%), improving compliance (59%) and optimising spending (57%). 

The goal is to understand the story that data reveals and turn it into actionable insights. 

Half of the survey participants said they struggled with using data proactively versus reactively. This is a major opportunity for improvement, as data can reveal areas for cost savings, traveller behaviour trends and out-of-policy bookings. 

The survey also shows that most travel buyers regularly dedicate time to working with travel data, with 56% preferring to leave working with data to professionals. 

Almost two-thirds (60%) regularly check their dashboards and analyse new data, though 40% interact with travel data only when required. Lack of time (44%) was the main reason for infrequent interaction with data. 

It reveals that 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. 

Just one in 10 utilise AI to collect, analyse and report travel data, and the main reason for employing AI is to save time. 

The report also shows that 64% of travel buyers consider real-time analytics identifying trends as the most valuable feature of data analytics tools. Meanwhile, over half (57%) identify built-in dashboards as important.  

“BCD Travel is capturing more data from more sources than ever before. We invest heavily in the consolidation, standardisation and normalisation of this data, ensuring the most accurate, quality data is provided back to our customers,” said Heather Wright, Vice President, Digital Strategy and Advancement at BCD Travel. 

bcdtravel.com