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What Does a Travel Manager Do And How Egencia Analytics Studio Helps

3 ways Egencia Analytics Studio helps travel managers

5 min
Posted: 15 July 2020
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You might think that corporate travel is easy to describe, but the details quickly get blurry. Without effective data analytics and visualization, management discussions about the success of your travel program might start to resemble a guessing game.

Business travel seems to be a simple topic: People go places. They spend the company’s money to fly, take trains, rent cars and stay in hotels. It seems straightforward, but it isn’t.

No matter how large your travel program is, most travel managers track a few core metrics. How many people booked in advance, like they’re supposed to? Are enough people using their business’ travel management company (TMC)? How much did we save in travel costs from negotiated rates last quarter? Is my TMC helping me automatically save money? Questions like this require the right data and analysis to provide accurate insights.

Egencia Analytics Studio is the solution. Built with travel managers and their day-to-day reporting needs in mind, it’s a user-friendly feature in our platform for people who manage business travel for a living. With Analytics Studio, you can explore travel expense data visually, discover hidden insights and identify new sources of savings. Track trends over time to optimize spend across travel categories such as air, hotel, train and car. Analytics Studio goes beyond a standard business dashboard with rich and fast data visualization, which allows you to quickly communicate important travel data and results with internal teams and executives.

Knowing how many of your travelers have adopted your TMC and are booking in policy is a critical first step in being able to effectively manage your travel program. In Analytics Studio, we take the guessing game out of the core measurements. You can quickly visualize top-line metrics such as Spend, Online Adoption, Policy Compliance and more across the entire program, and you can use rich filtering to dig deeper by mode of transport or department, for example.

In our work with companies that utilize travel as part of their growth strategy, we’ve found three ways that Analytics Studio helps travel managers.

1. Understanding your spend

With Analytics Studio, Egencia created compelling reports to share with your organization’s HR, finance, executive and procurement teams. We make this possible by providing a consolidated view of business travel data. Egencia stores all your travel data in one place, whether booking occurs online, offline or in the app — giving you a complete picture of your travel programme.

Looking at where your spend is going is a critical first step. For example, think about air spend — it’s important to know the top routes taken, how often they’re being flown and by whom. Once you have this information, you can look at how much money is spent and start thinking about where you can find savings by negotiating rates with airline suppliers. When your travel changes year to year, quarter to quarter or even initiative by initiative, having the insights into where resources should be funneled is optimal.

Analytics Studio gives you complete visibility over your airline spend across the organization with the Air dashboard. Here you can drill into spend and transaction counts by individual traveller, routes flown or airline. If you need to go deeper, there are reports by Department, Trip Type (domestic versus international) and Cabin Class. Dashboards like this are also available for Hotel, Train and Car, so you know we’ve got you covered.

2. Quickly view multiple layers of travel data

Relevance is critical for effective communication about travel data with your peers and senior management. For instance, if you manage travel for one region in a company that operates in a dozen countries, you’ll primarily want to know what’s going on in your region. The bigger picture may be helpful, but your managers are usually interested in their budget and not the entire organization.

Travel managers can assign different levels of access in Analytics Studio to employees based on role. The system is flexible, so it can adapt to your business needs. The rules allow users to see what they need to do their jobs, but not more. This way, people aren’t privy to data that doesn’t concern them and they aren’t overloaded with information about areas of the business that don’t relate to their work.

Analytics Studio also offers rich drill-down capabilities. You can filter data visualizations by department or travel group. Let’s say you want to compare Business Unit A to Business Unit B on how well each group follows advance booking rules. Analytics Studio has simple, click-based controls to generate comparative visual graphs on the fly. This can help you uncover patterns and trends in your travel program that may merit the attention of upper management, present savings opportunities and refine your compliance strategy.

MNC Data Visualization

3. Use reporting to keep travelers safe

Travel policies are intended to save money, but this type of savings requires compliance. Effectively driving compliance requires easy identification of policy violators and also the ability to aggregate data on the costs of non-compliance. A global business travel solution like Egencia reduces the burden of data collection.

Using data to drive effective conversations about policy can also help improve your adoption levels. For example, if travelers’ local customs aren’t accommodated, this could cause policy defections. At Egencia, we understand the importance of supporting particular modes of transport and having policies to back it up. Similarly, an analysis of savings from local policy compliance can provide insights into policies that could work globally.

Analytics Studio is built for ease-of-use for the people running business travel programs in their day-to-day jobs. It gives you the ability to understand how your travel program is performing, how it might perform better, where you can find more savings — and how you can effectively communicate to anyone in your company about the effectiveness of your travel program.

Read more from our Egencia Analytics Studio datasheet.

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