Most companies treat travel expense reports as a necessary chore, but what if they’re actually a goldmine of insights? By understanding how to leverage business intelligence like travel insights and reports, you can find ways to unlock savings, and even more; travel data can reveal patterns, behaviors, and opportunities that impact your company’s strategy, budgeting decisions, and even drive employee satisfaction.
We’ll look into the untapped value of travel data, what to look out for in your travel expense reports, and how to turn this data into actionable insights that can change the way you forecast, do business travel and manage expenses.
The untapped value of travel data
In a travel expense report like in a travel and expense management platform like GetGoing, you will find travel dates, costs, destinations, vendors, costs, purpose, travel by department and traveler, and the breakdown of travel by type (airfare, trains, hotels, cars). You will also find the % percentage of trips pre-approved, % of approved pre-trip requests, % of in policy booked trips, % of trips sent for approval, % of approved trips, and the % cancelled trips.
This data is often siloed or underutilized when it can be a powerful way of unlocking insights that can help you better make decisions about travel spend, budget allocation, show how well your team is doing at respecting the travel policy and your trip approval percentage. By knowing how well people are abiding by your travel policy, you can take the necessary measures to improve the adoption, which can save you money and help better protect your travelers.
What travel expense reports can reveal
- Spending trends: Identify high-cost areas, frequent destinations, and preferred vendors.
- Policy compliance: Spot patterns of overspending or non-compliance.
- Departmental behavior: Compare travel habits across teams or roles.
- Supplier negotiation opportunities: Use data to negotiate better rates with hotels, airlines, or car rental companies.
- Sustainability insights: Track carbon footprint and Co2 emissions from travel and identify greener alternatives.
Turn data into actionable business intelligence
Once you’ve looked at travel report insights, the next step is to transform these insights into actionable steps. Using dashboards, your company can better visualize patterns in travel behavior, spending and policy compliance across departments and time periods. For example, if you’re noticing frequent travel to a certain region, this might correlate with sales growth in that region, which can help you to invest strategically in that market.
Similarly, if you notice consistent overspending on last-minute bookings, this can help you make policy adjustments or carry out employee training to reiterate the importance of complying with the travel policy. Or if travel spend is getting out of control, you can consider shifting to virtual meetings. When you can treat travel expense data as a strategic asset, you can empower financial controllers and decision-makers to optimize budgets, improve operational efficiency and better align travel practices with company objectives.
8 Tips to start benefiting from this intelligence
- Make sustainability and ESG a part of your overall business goals — travel data can support environmental reporting and responsible travel policies.
- Standardize expense categories and mandatory trip purpose fields
- Encourage collaboration between finance, travel managers, and data analysts to figure out main KPIs and how to interpret them.
- Use a T&E platform like GetGoing to better track and analyze travel expense data.
- Treat travel expense data as a strategic resource instead of a simple back-office task
- There’s truth behind every receipt: travel expenses reflect business priorities, employee behavior, and operational inefficiencies.
- Go from reactive to proactive: instead of just approving expenses, use them to forecast and optimize.
- Implement data-driven travel management by aligning travel decisions with broader business goals.
The secret behind travel expense reports
Travel expense reports are a strategic asset that can be used to improve your business results, the effectiveness of your business trips and to uncover valuable insights that influence budgeting, policy, sustainability and even the employee experience. By leveraging the right tools and by encouraging collaboration across teams, companies can turn everyday travel expenses into smarter decisions that have a measurable impact on the company goals.
Look at your travel data with fresh eyes and start mining it for strategic insights, thinking not about what was spent but rather what can be learned from what was spent.