Traxo claims to have the solution to the increasing problem of corporate travel booking leakage

22 November, 2017

Itinerary intelligence and travel data aggregation technology solutions specialist Traxo says it has found a solution to the increasing level of business travel now being booked outside of a company's corporate travel scheme. Its new itinerary management and loyalty tracking technology integrates with travel management, expense management, and travel booking tools for capturing off-platform bookings for both corporate and leisure travel, solving the industry-wide problem of tracking off-channel corporate travel 'leakage' as it occurs.


Summary:

  • New Traxo FILTER claims to capture all company off corporate platform bookings for both business and leisure travel.
  • Around 40% of corporate travel spend is now estimated to be booked outside companies' official managed travel booking channels.
  • Traxo says FILTER's patent-pending data parsing technology integrates directly into a company's central email server with a less than 20 minute installation time.

Traxo says its FILTER email parsing solution is the first product on the market that provides corporate travel managers with truly comprehensive visibility into their total programme spend, in real time and adds to its suite of data management and technology solutions offered to travel agency, expense applications and risk management clients throughout the corporate travel ecosystem.

It is clear that as more technologically savvy individuals enter the workforce and technology is enabling a sharing economy to proliferate, maintaining a stringent corporate travel booking process is becoming more complex, especially as travellers can now book across various devices and platforms. While many companies are open to the greater self-sufficiency of the millennials it can make reconciliation much more complex for the likes of travel managers and finance professionals who are losing control of corporate expenditure.

An Industry study in the past year (Travel Programs: Challenges, Priorities and Implication from the GBTA Foundation, in partnership with Concur) indicates that nearly 40% of corporate travel spend is now booked outside companies' official managed travel booking channels, making it invisible to corporate travel managers and complicating their job of managing total programme spend and tracking employee whereabouts for duty-of-care purposes.

Traxo says FILTER's patent-pending data parsing technology integrates directly into a company's central email server, and automatically detects all travel reservation confirmation emails and post-checkout hotel folios received by any employee's corporate email account. Recognising travel confirmation emails from over 5,000 unique airline, hotel, car rental, travel agency sources globally, across nearly 40 languages, it "ensures virtually any off-channel booking will be captured," claims the developer, no matter how, or where, it was booked.

The new product is already compatible with the three major email systems used by corporations today: Microsoft Exchange, Office 365, and Google G Suite email. Because the formal implementation of the product is approved and controlled by the company's own IT department, "it is secure, transparent, configurable and fully auditable," says Traxo, with a typical installation time as little as 20 minutes.

The system effectively works like a spam filter, but instead of blocking emails it filters confirmation and other emails from travel suppliers logged in Traxo's increasing database that it says covers around 90% of suppliers. These are held within a single portal which automatically sends blind copies to an especially created Traxo email address set up for each client.

Once captured, all travel bookings are immediately displayed in an online dashboard that provides corporate travel managers with a real-time overview of employee itinerary information and the company's entire travel spend. From that centralised dashboard, data can then be seamlessly shared with the company's travel management companies, expense management, risk management or business intelligence applications.

"Corporate travel managers told us their ideal solution would automatically detect off-channel bookings in real time, without requiring the employee to take any action (like having to enter their loyalty program credentials or constantly forward travel confirmation emails)," says Andres Fabris, founder and chief executive officer, Taxo.

It is clear that Traxo has listened exactly to those wishes and engineered a product with exactly that simplicity goal in mind, and the result appears to be a seamless solution that ensures capture of all employee travel booking data across an entire organisation that enables corporate travel managers to immediately spot the leakage in their corporate travel programmes, without having to wait to reconcile expense and corporate credit card data up to 60-days later. This supports both larger corporate programmes addressing residual compliance concerns, as well as smaller programmes looking for a lower cost solution to provide consolidated reporting.