What are the key metrics in travel analytics?

The key metrics include travel spend, travel volume, average trip cost, savings achieved, compliance rate, and traveler satisfaction. These KPIs help organizations understand spending patterns, identify cost-saving opportunities, and measure program effectiveness.

How can travel analytics reduce costs?

Travel analytics reduces costs by identifying policy violations, detecting last-minute booking patterns, revealing cost leakages, and highlighting opportunities for vendor negotiations. Companies typically achieve 10-30% savings through improved visibility and data-driven decision-making.

What's the difference between descriptive and predictive travel analytics?

Descriptive analytics summarizes what has already happened using historical data, reports, and visualizations. Predictive analytics uses machine learning algorithms to forecast future trends and outcomes based on patterns in existing data, helping companies anticipate needs and optimize budgets proactively.

What are the key metrics in travel analytics?

The key metrics include travel spend, travel volume, average trip cost, savings achieved, compliance rate, and traveler satisfaction. These KPIs help organizations understand spending patterns, identify cost-saving opportunities, and measure program effectiveness.

How can travel analytics reduce costs?

Travel analytics reduces costs by identifying policy violations, detecting last-minute booking patterns, revealing cost leakages, and highlighting opportunities for vendor negotiations. Companies typically achieve 10-30% savings through improved visibility and data-driven decision-making.

What's the difference between descriptive and predictive travel analytics?

Descriptive analytics summarizes what has already happened using historical data, reports, and visualizations. Predictive analytics uses machine learning algorithms to forecast future trends and outcomes based on patterns in existing data, helping companies anticipate needs and optimize budgets proactively.

A quick guide to understanding business travel analytics

20 Sept 2023 · 5 MIN READ

Key takeaways

Business travel analytics is the practice of collecting and analyzing travel data to optimize corporate travel strategy, reduce costs, and improve decision-making.
Key metrics include travel spend, travel volume, average trip cost, savings achieved, compliance rate, and traveler satisfaction.
Three types of analytics—descriptive, diagnostic, and predictive—help companies understand past trends, identify causes, and forecast future patterns.
Companies using travel analytics typically achieve 10-30% cost savings through better policy compliance and vendor negotiations.
Travel management software can automate data collection and reporting, making analytics accessible without specialized staff.

What if your company could easily understand past and current travel trends, find correlations between different factors affecting business travel performance, and make predictions based on patterns in existing business travel data?

How could these insights improve your global business travel programs?

The field of collecting and analyzing data to optimize your company’s business travel strategy is called business travel analytics.
By using insights to make data-driven decisions, your organization can better manage travel expenditures, identify cost-saving opportunities, and improve overall business performance.

What is business travel analytics?

Business travel analytics is the systematic process of collecting, analyzing, and interpreting corporate travel data to optimize travel programs and reduce costs. It transforms raw booking and expense data into actionable insights that help organizations make informed decisions about their travel policies, vendor relationships, and budget allocations.

By using insights to make data-driven decisions, your organization can better manage travel expenditures, identify cost-saving opportunities, and improve overall business performance.

Investing in business travel analytics solutions is a great way to get ahead of competitors and streamline your business travel activities.

The business travel analytics process

The first step to take during the analytics process is to collect the necessary data. Business travel analysts must define the relevant KPIs and metrics, and then gather data on those from internal and external sources.

Next, they must use data analytics techniques to understand the data, create visualizations, and identify trends. These techniques include three main types:

Analytics type

Definition

Use cases

Descriptive analytics

Summarizes historical data through visualizations, spreadsheets, and statistics

Monthly spend reports, booking volume trends, expense breakdowns

Diagnostic analytics

Examines why trends occurred and how they impact business performance

Understanding policy violations, identifying cost overruns, analyzing booking pattern changes

Predictive analytics

Uses machine learning and algorithms to forecast future trends

Budget forecasting, demand planning, identifying potential savings opportunities

Finally, they can use the insights gained during this process to draw conclusions and take the next steps to optimize business travel spending.

Key metrics in business travel analytics

Business travel analytics involves analyzing data across several fields. These metrics and KPIs are useful for better understanding trends and patterns in business travel. They include:

Travel spend: Where, how, and when is money being spent on business travel? Are there ways your company can optimize travel spend?
Travel volume: How many trips are being taken? Does this vary over time? What are the transport methods being used (train, plane, etc.)?
Average trip cost: How much money do travelers spend on their business trips? What are the primary business travel cost centers?
Savings achieved: Are there any cost leakages or savings opportunities to identify?
Compliance rate: Are travelers complying with the company's business travel policies? Do they understand the policies, and are they able to easily access them?
Traveler satisfaction: Are employees' needs being satisfied when they travel? Are they happy with their business travel experience? How do they rate it?

Other important dimensions of data analysis

Not only is it important to understand key cost centers, it’s also useful to know how travelers are getting around. This means evaluating:

Booking patterns: When and how are travelers booking? What are they booking (hotels, trains, flights?)
Travel destinations: Where are people headed? Does this change over time or by region?
Preferred airlines/hotels: Which airfares and hotels do travelers prefer to book? Are there certain options your company would like travelers to use (because they are cost-effective, environmentally-friendly, your company has a relationship with the vendor, etc.?)
Seasonal variations: Do travel patterns vary over time, yearly, or by season?

Advantages of business travel analytics

Business travel analytics can help companies improve their travel processes and streamline their operations in a number of ways. Here are some of the main advantages of this field of analysis:

Improve travel policy compliance: Detect trends of policy violation, identify reasons for them, and curb overspending.
Save money: Find out why and when trips are being canceled or booked last-minute.
Improve employee satisfaction: Understand when and how employees like to book travel, and adjust business travel programs accordingly.
Create more accurate travel budgets: Make accurate forecasts and improve return-on-investment.
Identify optimal vendors: Choose the best vendors for your business needs, according to travel cost considerations and discounts offered.

How travel technology can support companies with business travel analytics

Business travel analytics is very useful, but launching a successful analytics program requires the right resources (such as time, and staff with specialized skills). Fortunately, there are many technologies in the business travel industry that can make the process easier.

Travel management software is designed to help companies with their business travel programs. It allows organizations to save time and money by managing their business travel through a centralized platform.

Corporate travel solutions can take the difficulty out of business travel by taking care of booking, travel policies, duty-of-care, business travel expense reporting, sustainability, and more.

Many corporate travel management software platforms have analytics functions to support companies in better understanding business travel patterns and practicing informed decision-making.

Perk offers a best-in-class business travel management reporting solution. With the Perk software, companies will have access to:

Advanced travel and expense dashboards: With flexible reporting, users can break data down by person, transport type, booking type, cancellations, recoverable VAT, and more. They can configure and schedule reports or alerts focusing on the data they need to make informed decisions, and then export those reports to give other teams and stakeholders a visual overview of where money is being spent, as well as their carbon emissions output.
VAT insights: Users can generate reports based on recoverable VAT , and predict the potential end-of-year savings from looking after VAT spend.
Account management: Premium Perk account holders get access to an account manager to help tailor reports, read data, and make cost-saving financial decisions.
Breakdown by cost: Perk reports offer the option to break everything down by cost in a single visual. Users can see how budgets are distributed between teams, transport, business trip locations, and more.
Carbon emissions reporting: With Green Trip, businesses can offset CO2 emissions spent on business travel . The Green Trip carbon footprint report is downloadable, and users can configure alerts when a company reaches goals. The report offers a clear overview of a business’s CO2 emissions by flight routes and hotel stays, as well as the cost spent on offsetting carbon emissions.
Interactive map: Travel managers can stay up-to-date on an entire teams’ business trip progress in real-time via an interactive map .

Discover how Perk helps your business travel analytics today!

Frequently asked questions

: The key metrics include travel spend, travel volume, average trip cost, savings achieved, compliance rate, and traveler satisfaction. These KPIs help organizations understand spending patterns, identify cost-saving opportunities, and measure program effectiveness.
: Travel analytics reduces costs by identifying policy violations, detecting last-minute booking patterns, revealing cost leakages, and highlighting opportunities for vendor negotiations. Companies typically achieve 10-30% savings through improved visibility and data-driven decision-making.
: Descriptive analytics summarizes what has already happened using historical data, reports, and visualizations. Predictive analytics uses machine learning algorithms to forecast future trends and outcomes based on patterns in existing data, helping companies anticipate needs and optimize budgets proactively.