I have two exciting innovations to share from Emburse. First, the world’s leading air and hotel reshopping solution is now integrated with the world’s leading mobile travel app. It’s like peanut butter and chocolate, the two are great separately but even better when combined. Second, companies can now automatically estimate the daily impact of NDC upon every air booking. Every flight that flows through our reshopping system is now benchmarked against the NDC equivalent fare (if it exists). The difference is the savings lost by not having access to NDC. This can be a substantial number, dependent on the carrier and the route.
It’s a rare event when you can find a solution that will increase savings and at the same time improve traveler satisfaction. Integrating reshopping into our Emburse Go Premier mobile travel companion is exactly that. Before this integration, lower rate offers at alternative hotels were communicated only via email. Email isn’t the ideal method to communicate with travelers. It’s considered legacy, outside the daily work flow, difficult to format, and oftentimes ends up in a junk folder. Sending the message via the Emburse Go Premier app solves all these issues. Travelers already have the app on their phone and in their pocket. Corporate travelers love the solution for a long list of reasons. Sending a message directly to the traveler’s pocket avoids spam/junk filters and gets immediate attention.
Another big positive is the increase to corporate savings. On average, searching across alternative hotels dramatically increases hotel savings. Lower rates are found 35% of the time, and the average savings is $120 per hotel stay. In addition, companies can shift a greater share of wallet to their preferred partners. By sending the lower rate offer to the app, traveler awareness and acceptance dramatically increases turning potential savings into realized. To date, companies using the new solution have realized a 3x increase in realized savings over an email-only approach.
Switching to NDC. Travel buyers today have been struggling to answer the question, “how has NDC impacted by air spend?” To answer this, many companies have applied staff to manually check selected flights made in the GDS to airline websites or Travelfusion. The process is time-consuming, expensive, inexact, and very low quality. By leveraging our reshop technology, every flight booked is checked and the NDC equivalent fare is captured. This is fed into our analytics, providing an exact estimate of the amount of savings to be gained or lost by not having full access to NDC fares.
Most interestingly, the impact varies greatly by client depending upon their preferred airlines, markets, fares purchased, etc. For some, the impact is huge - lost savings ranging from 20% to 30% of spend. For others, the impact is much less. Any travel manager should know the answer to this question to provide guidance to senior management and their TMC.
Whether it can save your organization many thousands of dollars, or simply provide you with the reassurance that you’re optimizing your travel program spend, our auditing solutions are definitely worth checking out. You can find more information here.