There are seven key performance indicators (KPIs) for corporate travel analytics anytime that assist travel and procurement managers measure how successful a travel programme is:
Average advance booking notice:
What’s the average lead time? What’d be the optimum lead time? If you’re looking to improve performance of your travel programme, you need to change the business travel behaviour. For instance, a procured travel booking in advance can reduce booking rates. You need to calculate the percentage as a KPI.
Average corporate travel spend by category:
You need to assess the average rates paid per transaction, the average category expenditure for hotels, air, car, rail, meetings, event, hire or related services. The expenditure information should be split up by route of travel or destination.
Scope of online adoption:
Compare the number of bookings made online against offline bookings. Did your online adoption rate increase over time—plot it against a particular time period. Business travel management tools can offer you this information in real time for continuous tracking of performance. Some can even provide recommendations on how to improve online adoption rates organization-wise.
Percentage of corporate travel spend w.r.to gross margin:
Calculate the percentage of your total travel expenditure or costs for particular categories with respect to the gross margin of your organization. Try to benchmark your findings with similar companies or enterprises with the same geo-locations, size or structure, etc.
Recommended hotel usage charge:
Calculate the percentage savings of preferred hotel usage against all procured hotel usage.
Purchasing different types of tickets:
What tickets do travelers buy: fixed or flexible tickets? Which travel class do they usually book? Besides, you can do a deep-level analysis and measure volume by service type including rail, air, car rental days or period of hotel stay.
Travel policy compliance:
Travel policy is usually built into the travel booking process. Travel policies, more often, are not done regularly, but if done frequently is useful to measure against your KPI’s, goals and previous business travel programme performance and suitably updated. For example, you can plot the number of bookings made in compliance with the travel policy against out-of-policy bookings over a particular period, and calculate the change in percentage of bookings. This will be a starting point to give policy compliance a gentle push. However, your travel manager or TMC should help create a flexible travel policy, whilst at the same time bring travel costs under control, and further enhance corporate travel experience.