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Complete & accurate trip details and insights

Total Trip Analysis with PredictX

We facilitated a comprehensive approach to assessing trip expenses by allowing you to examine the costs associated with the foundational elements of airfare and accommodation, alongside additional expenditures.

This holistic view empowered travel managers to grasp the entirety of their financial outlay and make informed decisions moving forward

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Why is total trip important?

A successful air program provides many benefits to the organization:
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Cost Efficiency

Around 40% of travel costs never go through the TMC. Total Trip Costs enables you to see and understand your total spend with suppliers
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Leakage Tracking

Total trip enables you to track where your program leakage is and why it’s occurring. 
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Vendor Tracking

You gain visibility into track vendor upselling or halo activity and its impact on spend with a vendor.
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Data Consolidation

Only through combined trip data can you really track ancillary purchases and upgrades.
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Compliance Management

Total Trip Cost enables you to optimize policies and manage behavior for all areas of trip spend.

What are the challenges in getting to a Total Trip Cost?

Achieving an accurate total cost of a trip involves several challenges. These challenges are specific to travel and expense data:

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Multiple sources:

TMCs, corporate cards, and expense systems, have no links between them, and do not pass identifiers through the chain, making consolidation time-consuming and virtually impossible to do reliably and repeatedly. 
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Ancillary costs:

baggage fees and in-flight purchases, are often not included in initial quotes, making it difficult to capture the true cost.
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Data Integration:

Discrepancies between booked and actual costs can arise due to changes or cancellations, complicating the calculation
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Leakage:

Identifying and quantifying booking channel leakage requires sophisticated data integration and analysis
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Cost Assessment:

Ensuring data accuracy and cleanliness is essential but challenging, as inconsistent or incomplete data can lead to incorrect cost assessment

All of these challenges mean that specialist technology needs to be developed to get to a true total cost of trip that is reliable and repeatable. This is very different from building analytics on top of a finance system and requires dedicated development to validate, cleanse and enrich incoming travel and expense data before it is fused into a “Trip-level” dataset.

PredictX has more than a decade of research and development as well as live-program experience and, as such, is uniquely positioned to help you benefit from the dramatically improved visibility into your program the Total Trip Costs brings.

More detail on how PredictX helps you do it better.

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PredictX helps you calculate total trip costs by consolidating and analyzing data from various sources such as bookings, card payments, and expensed spend. Utilizing its proprietary Trip Builder app, developed in partnership with travel teams, PredictX employs machine learning models to fuse, align and deduplicate data, ensuring accuracy.

This comprehensive approach captures all aspects of travel expenditure, including ancillary costs like baggage fees and in-flight purchases, which are often overlooked. By merging this data with existing policy and structure information, PredictX provides a full contextual analysis of total trip costs, booked-vs-paid differences, and true spend values. 

This enables you to see the real cost of sending someone from point A to point B, identify cost drivers, and quantify the impact of ancillary fees, thereby optimizing your travel program for better cost management and compliance.

FAQs

Explore some of the frequently asked questions about navigating air travel sourcing

How do you calculate total trip costs?

To calculate total trip costs, PredictX integrates data from various sources including bookings, card payments, and expensed spend. Our proprietary Trip Builder process takes advantage of machine learning to align and deduplicate this data, using combinations of data such as employee IDs, transaction dates and supporting information such as partial credit card numbers. 

The output of this process enables you to analyse areas such as ancillary payments, booked-versus-paid differences, and specific category breakdowns such as spend of multiple types with airlines, hotels, car rental firms, and others, offering a complete view of the true spend for a trip. As always, this data is merged with policy and corporate structure information to provide a comprehensive analysis.

What insights can I gain through visibility into total trip costs?

Gaining visibility into total trip costs allows you to fully understand the full financial impact of corporate travel on your organisation. By having a comprehensive view of all expenses associated with a trip, you can identify cost drivers and discrepancies between planned and actual spend. This enables you to optimise your travel program by:

- Managing supplier relationships more effectively, ensuring you're leveraging total spend and addressing instances of direct bookings.
- Identifying savings opportunities by pinpointing gaps in your managed travel program.
- Reducing costs by understanding the impact of vendor upselling and ancillary fees.
- Enhancing compliance management by developing strategies to address non-compliance and reduce booking channel leakage.
- Gaining behavioural insights to understand how changes in one category affect spend in others, allowing for more strategic decision-making.In essence, you can make data-driven decisions to streamline travel policies, negotiate better rates, and ultimately achieve a more cost-effective and efficient travel management process.

There are many nuances to my program, how will you support these?

Understanding the complexities of your program is critical to providing a solution that meets your nuanced needs. Our approach is to work closely with you to ensure that our technology aligns with your specific requirements.

We will support your program through:

Customization: Our platform is designed to be flexible, allowing us to tailor functionalities to accommodate unique aspects of your travel program, including regional policies and specific compliance requirements.
Engagement: We will engage with your stakeholders to understand the intricacies of your program and to ensure that our solution addresses all your concerns, including managing negotiated rates and supplier relationships.
Innovation: Our commitment to innovation means we continuously improve our tools and develop new functionalities that can handle the complexities of large-scale programs.
Collaboration: By forming a joint team, we will provide analysts to support each step of your program's evolution, ensuring that our solution integrates seamlessly with your processes.
Analytics: Our total trip analytics will give you a comprehensive view of all travel-related costs, including ancillary and direct spend, enabling you to manage and optimise your program effectively.
Support: We offer various support models to match your uptime, budget, and client management needs, ensuring that you have the right level of assistance when you need it.Our goal is to ensure that our solution not only meets your current requirements but is also able to adapt to your program's future growth and changes

What TMCs/payment providers/expenses systems can you support?

We support a wide range of travel management companies (TMCs), payment providers, and expense systems to ensure comprehensive coverage and integration for your travel program. 
Our connections include but are not limited to:

-Over 80 TMCs, including all the most commonly used, all large TMCs and many of the mid-tier.
-All major payment networks such as Visa, Mastercard, and American Express.
-Various expense systems like Concur, Peoplesoft, Chrome River, legacy SAP, and Workday.

Our capability to integrate with these providers ensures that we can consolidate and normalise data from multiple sources, despite the lack of standardised structured data sets and varying naming conventions. We specialise in interpreting and normalising credit card MCC codes and are dedicated to providing a global view of travel expenses.

Our platform is designed to handle the complexities of global travel programs and provides the network effect of accurate data for all our clients. This allows us to offer true total trip cost analytics, compliance management, and generate actionable insights into ancillary and direct spend, as well as booking channel leakage.

What kind of support does PredictX offer for ad-hoc reporting requests?

PredictX provides comprehensive support for ad-hoc reporting requests. Users can contact the PredictX Support Desk for assistance with creating custom reports or modifying existing templates to suit their specific needs.

How do you handle data issues?

Over a decade of R&D has gone into the development of PredictX’s capabilities in identifying and resolving data issues. Every input source that we receive undergoes several layers of checks that identify issues not only in data format, but also content. 

It is these issues of content that most often cause travel and expense teams pain, as they present as unrealistically expensive stays or short flights if they make it to the output analytics.

If identified, many data issues are resolved automatically using our machine learning models that have been trained on over $100 billion of spend. Others are rejected and the data processor invited to resubmit those errors. Whatever the solution, it is implemented seamlessly from the point of view of the travel team, relieving them of countless hours of data wrangling and enabling them to focus on creating value for their businesses.

Ready to unlock the potential of your travel data ?