Introducing Rocketrip Insights
Managing your company’s business travel shouldn’t get in the way of managing your actual business. Today we’re happy to announce a new feature set that makes travel management more streamlined than ever before.
Rocketrip Insights is an intuitive analytics console that makes it easy for finance, HR, and compliance professionals to stay on top of employee travel. It’s the first platform to go beyond the reporting capabilities provided by a travel management company (TMC) alone.
By aggregating data from all travel vendors – airlines, hotels, even Airbnb – Insights solves the problem of out-of-policy leakage: no matter how employees book, their spending is captured.
Insights is fully customizable to fit the needs of multiple stakeholders throughout an organization. CFOs can go to the Insights dashboard for a real-time snapshot of overall travel spend. Department heads can use it for expense approval by digging deeper into the itinerary for any given trip. Travel managers can see exactly what booking behaviors are driving spending and saving at their company.
Here’s a closer look at some unique capabilities of Rocketrip Insights:
Aggregated Travel Expenses
Insights presents the most comprehensive and intuitive view of an organization’s travel expenses. By aggregating travel spending by specific behavior, Insights highlights problem areas and shows opportunities for savings. To help guide conversations about responsible spending, it breaks out flight, hotel, train, and rental car expense data into the categories that matter most: managers can see spending by department, or even on the individual employee level. Knowing who is overspending and who is saving allows companies to focus on the highest impact opportunities.
Automated Compliance
Approving travel expenses can be hugely time-consuming. By automating the travel compliance review process, Insights takes an enormous workload off finance and HR teams’ plates. Rocketrip automatically flags itineraries that are outside of company policy, as well as those that are unusually expensive. If an employee’s trip falls during a period of peak demand – during a major conference, for instance – the company administrator will be notified of a spike in market rates. The result? A lower volume of high-cost travel.
Rocketrip will continue to add to its Insights console in the coming months. Upcoming features will offer enhanced capabilities in several key areas.
Benchmarking
Knowing how much you spend on corporate travel is good. Knowing what this number actually means is even better. That’s why Insights will soon benchmark a company’s travel spend internally and externally against peers who use the platform. Finance professionals will be able to anonymously compare their average trip, flight, hotel, and rental car costs to those of similar businesses. This feature of Insights will also be useful for internal comparison, and will show how travel behaviors vary among employees, departments, and geographic location. For the first time, companies will be able to gauge the health of their travel culture and pinpoint ways to improve it.
Vendor Comparison
Rocketrip cuts a company’s average trip cost 30% by incentivizing employees to spend less on their flights, hotels, trains, and rental cars. Insights will amplify the savings by identifying cost-effective travel options. By highlighting the most common itineraries and vendors used, Insights will let administrators focus on areas of maximum importance. For instance, a company with offices in San Francisco and Boston will be able to search for a specific route – SFO to BOS – to see how airlines compare on price, flight volume, departure times, and other criteria. Insights will also show how employees book – and how much they spend – by airline, hotel, and rental car provider. Travel managers can use this data to negotiate discounted rates with vendors, and to suggest affordable travel options to employees.
Traveler Security
Duty of care standards require that a company ensures employees remain safe on the road. A planned feature of Insights, the World Map View, will help fulfill duty of care requirements by showing risk and compliance managers exactly where traveling employees are at a given time. During emergency situations, it is critical to have a complete record of employees’ whereabouts. The World Map View will bring this all together by aggregating employee contact information with geo-location data from Rocketrip itineraries.
These new and upcoming features make Rocketrip the most powerful travel management tool available, allowing companies to understand employees’ spending from top to bottom – and even to control that spending before it happens. With Insights, a mass of data from thousands of individual trips turns into a clear, complete picture of a company’s travel.
