Carlson Wagonlit Travel, the global travel management company, has launched CWT Travel Consolidator, an analytics tool that captures every part of an organisation’s travel and expense spend, helping travel managers make the right decisions, and saving clients money.
“Gathering, matching and reconciling travel and expense data is challenging and it’s often hard to get the full picture of the total cost of a trip,” said Christophe Renard, VP, CWT Solutions Group. “CWT Travel Consolidator gives you that visibility – and can save up to 7 per cent on travel costs,” he said.
The web-based platform combines air, hotel and ground transport transactions booked through the TMC with credit card, expense and HR data. This reveals the hidden costs of business travel and off-channel spend, enabling travel managers to identify missed savings opportunities, improve compliance and increase organizations’ negotiating power with suppliers.
CWT Travel Consolidator’s data algorithms consolidate, standardise and clean up the data, saving travel managers the time and hassle of having to fix inaccuracies. Having all their data on a single platform, with configurable dashboards and reporting capabilities, means travel programs can be more efficiently managed with all card, travel and expense data integrated in one place.
Integrated data also provides valuable information on spending outside official channels such as flights and hotels booked on personal cards and poorly understood costs like airline seat selection charges, meals, laundry and incidentals. CWT Travel Consolidator not only reveals these costs but also attaches them to the trips and travellers who incurred them. Costs can be then be cut, reported and analysed by trip, cost center, organisational structure, route, on vs off-channel, and supplier. That makes the data much more manageable, delivers insights, and ensures travel policies remain fit for purpose even as circumstances change.
A CWT-sponsored survey by the GBTA Foundation found that 64 per cent of travel managers feel they don’t have enough data to calculate the total cost of a trip. Nearly three-quarters (73 per cent) struggle to reconcile differences in reports due to data formatting, while 58 per cent said they spend too much time reconciling and cleaning data.
To help travel managers get the most out of the tool, CWT has a team of 160 travel sourcing and optimisation consultants who can advise clients, enabling them to make sense of their data and take informed decisions to improve their travel programmes.