No matter what you call it, when employees book their travel anywhere except their travel management company, it’s a blindspot.

The reasons why employees book direct are many. Norm Rose and Bing Liu at Phocuswright uncovered some interesting findings about the rise of the smartphone as a driver of this shift in behavior. Most corporate travel managers will agree, though, that there’s a need to support off-channel bookings in at least some circumstances — conferences, special events, customer-funded travel, or even to hire and retain the best talent.

Off-channel bookings are here to stay and most would agree that they’re on the rise. The core challenge remains — they’re still a blindspot.

How do you understand your booking blindspot?

At Traxo, we’ve spoken with dozens and dozens of corporate travel managers about this challenge with off-channel bookings. Based on our conversations, it comes down to two simple reasons for understanding the blindspot:

1. Knowing where employees are for safety and duty of care
2. Capturing a comprehensive and detailed view of total travel spend

While travel suppliers are being more innovative these days, only a handful have made sharing employee booking data with corporations a priority. The responsibility for understanding the blindspot falls completely on the corporate travel manager.

Tracking off-channel booking activity starts with simply discovering that a booking has been made. Most methods used are sadly manual and include receiving booking emails from travelers, maintaining shared spreadsheet files, and even hallway conversations. Does this sound familiar?

These methods are insufficient for (at least) a few reasons:

• Employees must take action to send in their booking confirmation emails and must remember to do it every time and for every booking
• When the employee forgets to notify of trip updates and cancelations, the travel manager has incorrect data
• Travel managers have a burden of keeping track of all bookings and changes (in more spreadsheets)

Supplier-direct integrations such as Concur TripLink sound good, but the fact is that they are expensive and time consuming for suppliers to implement. As a result, rollouts have been slow and coverage remains quite low. Additionally, a solution like TripLink doesn’t help non-Concur customers.

The ideal solution to achieve a complete understanding of the critical off-channel blindspot would combine both automatic capture of off-channel bookings as they are made, as well as deliver complete coverage across all suppliers and support clients regardless of what booking tool, expense application, or TMC they may use.

Traxo FILTER to the rescue

Traxo FILTER solves this challenge of understanding off-channel bookings. It is the first product on the market that provides corporate travel managers with truly comprehensive visibility into their total program spend, and does so in real time. Traxo FILTER ensures virtually any off-channel travel booking will automatically be captured, no matter how, or where, it was booked.

How does Traxo do this? Traxo FILTER’s patent pending technology integrates directly into a company’s central email server (Microsoft Exchange, Office 365, and Google G Suite supported). When a travel confirmation or hotel folio email is detected by the server, it’s flagged for processing by Traxo and the data made available to the corporate travel manager through an online dashboard, or integrated into a company’s expense, reporting, duty of care, or TMC tools.

Additionally, because Traxo FILTER is controlled by the client’s IT team or email administrator, it’s highly secure — there is never any third party accessing your emails. The Traxo FILTER rule set is configurable by the client, and is fully trackable, auditable, and transparent. Best of all, it can take as little as 20 minutes to install.

The days of requiring employees to manually send in their booking confirmations and maintaining out-of-date spreadsheets are over.

Traxo FILTER is available now as part of a Traxo CONNECT subscription. Sign up today and get rid of your booking blindspot!

Traxo FILTER: The missing link for understanding off-channel bookings was originally published in Traxo on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Generating sales can be a complex and sometimes expensive endeavor, with solution demos, RFPs, and on-site presentations and follow-up meetings all forming part of the process. Even after the initial sale, account managers need to ensure that customers remain happy with the relationship and, where possible, upsell new products and services.

Calculating the cost of these sales is rarely straightforward. Even if companies already have both CRM and expense automation solutions in place, these solutions only tell half the story, and there is no simple, automated way to correlate this information and measure costs versus outcomes.

Without this information, it’s hard to perform meaningful analysis of the efficacy of your team’s travel and entertainment expense spend, and allocate accordingly for the future. While you may can calculate a crude cost of sale average, it’s harder to work out how this differs for different sized accounts. Making sense of more nuanced data is even more difficult. What expense types deliver the most return on investment? Are there team-wide or individual trends for the value generated by certain expenses, such as prospect meals?

Without this data, sales team budgeting becomes difficult, as it’s often based on inaccurate data. This can lead to some team members’ T&E budgets being higher or lower than necessary, which can result in inefficient spend or curtailed trips. Alternatively, should budgets need to be adjusted, poorly-informed decisions could lead to across-the-board cuts, potentially impacting the ability to close sales.

In response, Chrome River has launched Chrome River PROSPER, providing our customer with an easy way to see how travel and entertainment spend impacts revenue generation. By synching Chrome River EXPENSE with CRM Data — accounts, opportunities, even down to individual contacts — PROSPER allows detailed travel and entertainment expense data to be allocated to each interaction. This data can then be viewed within the PROSPER interface, clearly showing how much each member of your team has spent on a specific prospect or customer, even down to the level of individuals at each organization. This is shown alongside information such as potential sale size, so it’s easy to see at a glance how spend compares to others for a specific account. As this data is viewed in a clear, map-based dashboard, sales team leaders can obtain high-level snapshots at a glance, as well as drill down into accounts or sales team members to obtain more granular insight.

While this data can be used to see historical trends on how effective spend has been, its real benefit lies in the ability to make smarter budget planning decisions. Sales leaders can see where their team members’ upcoming travels are planned, and mapping this against account data, can make suggestions for other customers they can visit. Finance teams can use this historical data to make smarter, more informed travel and entertainment budget calculations which increase investment in more effective sales activities.

Learn more about Traxo’s folio parsing solution for automating corporate travel expenses, jointly developed with Chrome River

How to Learn True Cost of Sales was originally published in Traxo on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

If you travel regularly for business, at some point you’re going to experience a flight delay. It’s part and parcel of life on the go. But the vast majority of people don’t know how to manage the situation other than heading back to the business lounge for a refreshment and to wait it out.

The airline industry’s best-kept secret

As a business traveler, you might assume that the purchaser of the ticket — your employer — would be entitled to any flight delay compensation.

However that’s not how things work. It is the passenger who has suffered the inconvenience, not the person who paid for the ticket. It’s you that’s owed the money.

This is the general principle set out in EC 261, the EU Air Passenger Rights Regulation for flight delays, cancellations and cases of overbooking. It doesn’t matter whether you’re an employee of a private sector company or a public official. So while flight delays happen, that doesn’t mean you have to accept them.

Flight delays have a silver lining

Even though 8 million people around the world are eligible for compensation, less than 1% get the money they’re entitled to. This is mostly because people aren’t aware of their air passenger rights. Did you know, for example, that the law applies to any flight disruption from the past three years?

The good news for frequent flyers is that it’s entirely possible that the cash to pay for your next holiday away from the office is sitting there in your work inbox, waiting to be claimed.

At AirHelp, we combine legal expertise in air travel with world-class AI and machine-learning specialists. We’ve provided a platform for three million air passengers in over 200 countries to enforce their air passenger rights so far. We hope that you can be next.

So here’s how to manage a flight delay:

Then, the quickest way to check if you’re eligible for compensation is by entering your flight details on our website. We look at factors like the weather and technical issues to determine if, and how much, you could qualify for in compensation.

Why do people prefer AirHelp for their claim?

Airlines would rather give you a voucher to quiet your complaint than give you the money you deserve, so more often than not they will deny your initial claim, or they may ignore your claim request entirely. Either way, the burden of time and navigating the complex legal system is placed on you.

Never miss out on compensation again

For passengers who are just discovering their air passenger rights, or for those who aren’t sure if they have old claims, AirHelp can sync your email with any flight from the past three years, and keeps travelers notified in the event of future disruptions eligible for compensation.

For more information and to check your eligibility, visit airhelp.com

How To Manage Flight Delays was originally published in Traxo on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Traxo FOLIO provides a first-of-its-kind solution for extracting fully itemized spend detail from a hotel receipt upon checkout, enabling more granular visibility into T&E spend for more proactive expense management. Whereas card data typically only reports what was spent at the aggregate merchant level — think “$800 at Hotel XYZ” — Traxo FOLIO automatically breaks down that $800 into 22 categories across multiple languages, covering things like meals, parking, wifi charges, room rate, taxes, and more.

Built on Traxo’s industry-leading Traxo CAPTURE data aggregation platform, Traxo FOLIO processes data from HTML emails or PDF attachments in seconds. From there, it can be seamlessly integrated via API into preferred expense management applications and reporting tools — even to a client’s Travel Management Company (TMC) for compliance tracking.

Additionally, clients can pair Traxo FOLIO with Traxo’s itinerary data parsing solution, enabling comparisons of booked data to what was actually spent. By capturing the original travel confirmation and reservation details at the time of booking, and then comparing to the folio detail for itemization of spend, clients can derive a much clearer picture of ancillary spend during the hotel stay. This in turn drives better budget planning and forecasting.

Traxo FOLIO data can also provide a wealth of information to inform hotel supplier rate negotiations. If a client finds that employees are regularly spending $30+ on breakfast or regularly paying $20+ for wifi access, then rolling in free breakfast or premium wifi as included amenities in the next negotiation can help reduce those costs. Likewise, if a client already has free amenities like breakfast included in their rate plan, this data can be a signal for travel managers to recoup costs that should not have been charged in the first place.

Traxo FOLIO is available now for clients globally, supporting virtually any hotel and covering multiple languages.

Introducing Traxo FOLIO for Enhanced Expense Management was originally published in Traxo on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Companies would deploy top-notch corporate travel booking tools with the best rates and amenities procured by their travel management companies (TMCs). These services would be so fabulous and user-friendly that employees would use them religiously. And with 100% employee compliance, all that spend and itinerary data would flow seamlessly to the company’s risk management team and service providers. Risk alerts, employee location updates, and support requests based on this fully integrated booking data would happen automatically, in real time. Corporate travel managers could rest easy with the confidence that their fully integrated, dynamically automated managed travel program essentially runs itself, worry-free.

Unfortunately, that’s not the world we live in (yet). Comprehensive Duty of Care continues to be a hairy mess for even the most strongly managed travel programs. Unless a company has 100% compliance, gaps in coverage will continue to exist.

At the heart of the issue is data: how can you manage what you can’t see? With the proliferation of travel supplier incentives to book direct, the superior usability of supplier and online travel agency (OTA) mobile apps for booking, and in many cases, the simple fact that some travel inventory isn’t available via a corporate booking tool, the notion of achieving 100% compliance in a corporate travel program is simply unrealistic. We know that off-channel bookings are a problem now, and will continue to be a problem for the foreseeable future.

So maybe it’s time we get practical about the issue.

“Acceptance” may be too strong a word, but “acknowledging” that there are valid cases for booking off-channel could be a good place to begin, as noted in a new study by Amadeus and the London School of Economics, which noted:

Over 80 percent of CxOs indicated that the creation of a ‘cultural contract’ with employees was essential in promoting responsible travel behaviour with the balance of control for on-trip decisions residing with the employee, including under what conditions exceptions to policy could occur. Best-practices T&E was based on ‘trust’ and an open facilitative corporate culture.

By starting from a position of trust in employees to make smart decisions, companies can better engage employees in managing their own travel risks so they feel safer on the road. Making it easier (and less threatening) for employees to share their travel plans when booked off-channel is the best place to start:

• Facilitate and encourage employees to opt-in to automated services that import off-channel booking data — the most comprehensive and friction-less way to capture data.
• Leverage solutions like corporate email forwarding to enable employees to send in off-channel booking details — always a useful backstop despite the manual nature.
• Educate employees on the importance of sharing this data — with over half of respondents to a recent BTN survey indicating their companies either didn’t offer risk training, or weren’t certain if they do, there is a distinct opportunity to close the data gap through basic training.
• Most importantly, put away the compliance stick — employees will be much more willing to share this valuable data if they aren’t afraid of being penalized.

Companies can still encourage — and even incent — employees to leverage the preferred managed travel services on offer, but by recognizing that these off-channel booking situations will continue to occur, and taking a practical approach to addressing the data challenges they present, forward-thinking companies will be able to close the data gap that hinders effective Duty of Care management today. Additionally, greater visibility into these off-channel bookings means travel managers can gain better understanding into the complexion of these bookings to inform supplier negotiations, policy updates, and potential areas of usability enhancements for corporate booking tools.

Striking a practical balance between compliance and reality means everybody wins: safer traveling employees, more secure corporate travel programs, and greater sanity for corporate travel managers.

Managing Corporate Travel: Practical Realities for Duty of Care was originally published in Traxo on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I hope your 2017 is going well; for the Traxo team 2017 has gotten off to an amazing, rocket-fueled start!

We finished 2016 on a high note, announcing the close of our $5.2M Series B round, let by new investor TripAdvisor and joined by existing investors Thayer Ventures, Advantage Capital Partners, and Silver Creek Ventures, and welcoming new investor Aristos Ventures. These funds will be used to accelerate our technology initiatives, and expand our sales and marketing footprint. More to come on those fronts soon, so stay tuned!

Our product team has been busy cranking out a range of new services and features, which we’re excited to show off at this month’s Business Travel Show (BTS) event in London, Feb. 22–23. We’ll be demoing the latest version of Traxo Connect, our solution for travel managers who need to track off-platform travel spend. If you’re a corporate travel manager who will be at BTS, please swing by booth B672 to learn more.

We’ve also rolled out a number of enhancements to our Traxo Capture email parsing solution, making it even more robust for our partners:

• With well over 2,500 travel booking sources covered globally, our itinerary email parsing service is the broadest in the market, including every major airline, hotel chains, car rental provider, online and corporate travel agencies, and more.
• We’ve expanded support for rail service, cruise bookings, and alternative lodging and shared transportation services, keeping pace with growing demand for these services
• Our clients now have access to an unlimited number of parsing mailboxes — making it easy to support a unique “plans@” mailbox for each individual customer or client they serve
• Expanded manual parsing support provides a backup for emails that aren’t processed automatically — ensuring nothing falls through the cracks

We are committed to making our email parsing and technology services the best of the best, and we’re pleased that our clients recognize this. On that note, we’re thrilled to welcome two new clients to the Traxo portfolio: Abacus, a slick expense management application that focuses on real-time data management; and Tripgrid, which provides a next-generation collaborative corporate travel planning tool for teams.

With such a wide range of use cases supported, it’s always exciting for us to see how our clients utilize our technology in different ways. This underscores Traxo’s primary mission: to be the most sophisticated and robust aggregation platform for traveler data on the planet.

And if you’d like to join us — we’re hiring!

Cheers,
Andres Fabris
Founder | CEO

Welcome to 2017! was originally published in Traxo on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.