How to use travel data analytics tools to deliver better business travel programmes
For Travel Programme Managers, having complete visibility of your business’s travel spend, booking behaviours, travel patterns, and use of preferred suppliers is vital to making accurate and informed budget predictions that your business can rely upon. Forecasting future travel spend in a fast-changing travel landscape might feel like you need a crystal ball, but with the right tools and data at your fingertips, you can be confident of making smart decisions that put you and your company in control of your budget while maximising the return on your travel investment.
But where do you start when you need to understand data across hundreds and thousands of bookings every month? That’s where CTM Data Hub comes into play. CTM Data Hub is a sophisticated travel data analytics platform, providing highly visual and easy-to-digest dashboard reports for at-a-glance programme performance snapshots, coupled with the option to interrogate your data for in-depth programme insights. And with predictive insights capability, you can experiment to see how policy changes today can impact your programme’s performance in the future-making your travel budget predictions and policy recommendations both accurate and easy.
Digestible data to understand travel spend and behaviour
As one of the world’s largest travel management companies, Corporate Travel Management (CTM) uses big data to understand evolving market trends, build intelligent benchmarks, and accurately forecast for the future. We use a combination of individual reports and multiple dedicated dashboards to understand everything from advance purchase windows to KPIs and carbon emissions.
If you’re trying to understand online booking trends or just want to know what your sales team spent on flights last month, you can find it easily in CTM Data Hub.
CTM pre-configures dashboards for you so you can get the most out of your data from day one. Each dashboard contains multiple layers of analysis that you can access in just one click. Quickly see which types of trips are booked at the last minute, or who’s continually booking out of policy so you can find ways to increase savings on business travel.
Uncover actionable insights in your data with smart filters
It is important to have a holistic overview of your company’s travel. Because we know business travel data has so many variable components, we make it simple for you to dissect your data right from within each dashboard report. Simply select from filters on the same screen, such as the reason for travel, department, project code or other custom parameters, to quickly obtain more granular data and understand the root cause of any change.
Filters can be incredibly powerful. They help you paint a clear picture of how small changes can have an outsized impact on your business travel budget. It’s easier to influence booking behaviour changes with an underperforming team/department when you can demonstrate the impact of behaviours compared to their peers.
One global reporting hub for multi-regional travel programmes
Managing different data sets and tools for multi-regional travel programmes can be challenging. With CTM Data Hub, Global Travel Managers can get the full picture of their travel programme’s data and performance in one global travel reporting tool, with consolidated travel data from both CTM-operated locations and our global partners.
We collate and verify your global data, making it easy to review while also being able to filter and sort by region, country, division, or individual department codes. By understanding your regional and local travel trends within your travel programme, you can better support your regional teams by making educated and relevant decisions relating to policy changes, adopting new tools or preferred partner agreements.
Understand your environmental impact with Climate+
Sustainability is an increasingly important focus for our customers. Knowing the facts about what CO2 emissions are created from business travel activity and how different aspects of the travel programme contribute to environmental impact are key to helping raise awareness and education within the travel buyer community. That same data is critical in helping our customers take actionable steps to reduce their environmental impact, like purchasing carbon credits, commonly known as offsetting, selecting travel suppliers based on the carbon impact of their services or their use of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF).
We show you CO2 emissions broken down by travel type and airline cabin class month-on-month as well as the average kg of CO2 per trip and per traveller. Our global partnership with South Pole, one of the world’s leading climate action organisations, means you can even see the real-time carbon market costs to offset your current travel from within the Climate+ dashboard.
You can preview and learn more about individual climate projects provided by South Pole such as rainforest conservation, clean energy and others, and choose to support one or several sustainability projects.
Use data to monitor business traveller wellbeing
Taking care of business travellers is about more than meeting the legal requirements of your company’s duty of care. Even for the most seasoned road warrior, weeks away from home, early starts, red-eye flights, and timezone readjustments can have an impact on traveller wellbeing as well as their productivity and performance.
CTM Data Hub arms you with the data you need to demonstrate to your HR team and other business leaders where individuals are potentially at risk, based on their travel behaviours. Understand who is at risk of fatigue or burnout by dissecting travel data by:
- Number of days away
- Number of trips and mileage
- Red-eye flights
- Same-day return trips
- Fare class usage by flight duration
- Time-zones crossed
- Mean interval between trips.
Alongside these travel data metrics, we include a comprehensive guide to business traveller wellbeing so you can get started encouraging line managers and company leadership to take actionable steps that will ensure you have happier, healthier travellers who enjoy their role, deliver results, and reap the rewards that business travel presents.
