Measurement

Your tracking system cannot see the travellers you most need to find

Every travel management company will show you a map with dots on it. The demonstration is genuinely impressive and the tool is genuinely useful, and there is a structural limitation nobody mentions during it: the map shows what the system booked.

Travel booked on a personal card, on an airline’s own website, by an assistant who has always done it that way, or through a conference organiser’s block booking, is not a faint dot. It is no dot. The map is complete, confident and wrong, and nothing on the screen indicates which.

Why this is worse than an obvious gap

An incomplete report that announces its own incompleteness is a manageable problem. You know to ask elsewhere.

A traveller-tracking report does not do that. It answers the question “who is in Jakarta” with a list, and the list looks like the answer. The failure mode is not that somebody is missed — it is that somebody is missed and the report said otherwise, which is a much harder thing to catch and a much worse thing to explain afterwards.

The duty this sits under is s.2(1) of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, and the duty is the employer’s. A tool does not discharge it; it helps you discharge it, and only over the population it can see.

Measuring it, before buying anything

This takes an afternoon and no procurement:

1. Take a quarter. One complete quarter, far enough back that expenses have settled.
2. Pull travel spend from the booking channel. Whatever your current supplier or tool reports: air, rail, hotel, for that quarter.
3. Pull travel spend from everywhere else. Corporate card transactions in travel merchant categories, plus travel lines in expense claims, for the same quarter.
4. Subtract. The second number, minus anything that is genuinely also in the first, is your leakage.
5. Do it by department. The total is a number. The breakdown is a plan, because leakage is almost never evenly distributed — it concentrates in one team, one office, or one senior traveller’s assistant.

Expect the result to be larger than anyone predicted. That is the normal outcome, not a sign that the method is wrong.

What the number actually tells you

A large, concentrated figure is good news. Concentrated leakage is a conversation with a small number of people, and it is fixable without a system change.

A large, evenly spread figure is a policy problem. If everyone is booking around the channel, the channel is either difficult, slow, or does not have the content people need. Those are three different fixes and none of them is a better tracking product.

A small figure changes what you should be buying. If leakage is genuinely minimal, tracking capability is worth paying for, because it will actually see what you need it to see.

Two questions for a supplier, sharper than the usual one

Instead of do you offer traveller tracking — to which the answer is always yes — the two questions that separate suppliers are:

• “What happens to travel booked outside the channel? Can any of it be brought in after the fact, and how?” Some suppliers can ingest itineraries from other sources, which does not solve leakage but does put the dot on the map.
• “Show us, live, who is in a named city on a named date, using a test itinerary.” Not a screenshot, not a case study. A demonstration takes five minutes and ends several arguments.

Both are in section 6 of the free tender template on this site, alongside the rest of the duty-of-care questions.

The uncomfortable conclusion

If you have meaningful leakage, buying a better tracking system is buying a better view of a subset. The money is better spent on making the channel the path of least resistance — content people actually want, a tool that is faster than the alternative, and a policy that says what happens when somebody books around it.

That is a less satisfying answer than a product, and it is cheaper.

All notes · Comparison criteria · RFP template