This year’s Business Travel Show featured presentations and panel discussions with experts from across the industry. We’ve collated our highlights for those who missed the event.
Travel managers are under constant pressure to save money and price assurance technology could be the answer. After you book a hotel or flight, it continually monitors prices as they fluctuate. If it finds the same room or flight for less, it alerts you with a note to rebook.
Bruce Hanna, general manager EMEA at Yapta, explains how price assurance technology can help find savings at five stages of the travel lifecycle.
Search and Booking
Bookers no longer have to spend hours trawling the web for low prices. Yapta found that businesses with more than 2,500 frequent travellers wasted $775,000 in annual work time by looking and booking outside their programme[1]. By finding the best deals, price assurance technology means that travel managers can focus on their number-one priority: compliance with their corporate travel policy.
Post-Booking
Price assurance technology starts searching as soon as a booking is logged. Rebooking the exact same room or flight at a lower price means zero disruption for the traveller and instant savings for the organisation. It’s also possible to adjust the parameters of the monitoring software for greater flexibility in hotel amenities, bed types and room types.
Post Travel
Travel managers can harness this technology to monitor compliance across the organisation automatically. For example, to reveal what options were available at the time of booking in order to assess whether a business traveller booked non-compliant accommodation or flights because there was nothing else available.
Performance Analysis
In addition, travel managers now have the digital tools at their disposal to track pricing and assess the value of their programmes. For example, they can compare negotiated prices with those found at the time of booking (or rebooking) to assess the durability of negotiated prices.
Supplier Negotiation
When it comes to annual reviews with suppliers, travel managers have the data they need to accurately assess value. This helps them understand which negotiations should take priority, which suppliers they might want to add or remove from their programmes and whether RFPs are necessary.
Key Takeaways
- Price assurance technology can save companies money.
- Digital tools are useful when it comes to tracking prices.
- Data can help travel managers better understand the value of their negotiated supplier deals