TAMS Travel Tech Landscape

A travel manager uses business intelligence tools to monitor pre-trip data and identify travel that may be non-compliant with company policy. The data can also be used to identify high risk travel, allowing for proactive consultation with the risk management and recommendations for vetted airlines, hotel or other travel services in high risk areas. BI tools can be used post-trip to convert data to executive summaries, cost projections, budget analysis, and travel trends for review and consumption by the Travel manager and/or other business stakeholders or for use in other projects like supplier selection, contract management or RFP requests.

TMC's use BI tools to provide actionable data to corporate customers. Often, TMCs use a combination of proprietary and 3rd party solutions that make up their business intelligence toolset. TMCs may present the data to customers in a pre-packaged output, or through self-service tools or both. A TMC must have good control of data sources and clear data transformation and data transfer practices in place in order to deliver quality BI tools.

As a supplier of Business Intelligence (BI) Tools, our mission is to provide travel & procurement leaders with the actionable data they need to help them: a) take prioritized, corrective measures; b) optimize travel spend, and c) achieve their overall travel program goals & objectives. For example, BI benchmark data enables buyers to compare their own program performance, pricing & discounts against volatile market conditions, as well as like-sized peer companies. Booking trend data, particularly post-booking/pre-trip, enables buyers to proactively avoid overspending. Real-time contract auditing tools ensure that buyers are realizing the deals they've negotiated, by avoiding lost savings scenarios. "Duty of Care" BI tools & alerts support traveler safety & wellbeing, by avoiding travel to high risk/dangerous destinations.

Content aggregation creates more and better options for travel managers to offer in their travel program. By offering more options, a travel manager can retain all bookings within the travel program, thus having greater visibility of traveler locations as needed for duty of care.

From a TMC perspective, the content aggregators provide a key service in bringing all supplier offerings together into a single environment. Instead of needing to go to each supplier website or connect to each supplier directly through an API, content aggregators already play that role, providing a single tool or portal from which to select content. Content Aggregators can include GDS’s, however, some GDS’s are built on the legacy Computerized Reservation Systems of the airlines from back in the 1990’s, or the newer entrants creating API connections to airlines via the NDC standard, and offering other third party content such as AirBnB, and newer suppliers, and/or GDS’s such as Amadeus, have been operating on a fully open system environment that normalizes both NDC and EDIFACT content since 2017.

As a travel supplier, using Content Aggregators means that I provide my products and services to Content Aggregators to allow other third parties to access and search for my products and services as content. This allows multiple third parties to access my content without coming directly to my website or without calling an API for data about available products and services. The financial arrangement is such that I pay the Content Aggregator in order to have my content listed and available. The use of content aggregation systems, and related costs, are somewhat of a risk to my business model, and can conflict with other strategies such as Direct Connect and NDC capabilities which provide me distribution of my products with less cost and less added complexity third parties often introduce.

For TM, offer as a benefit to travelers so they don't have to research on their own.

Partner with thirdparty companies who will fight for delayed flight compensation

N/A