Travelport and IBM have introduced an artificial intelligence (AI) platform designed to help businesses manage their corporate travel expenditure.
“IBM Travel Manager was created for corporate travel managers by corporate travel managers,” said Travelport SA country manager, Claudette Thorne. “It is targeted to be sold directly to corporate travel customers, and supports a variety of data sources, including booking data, expense data, corporate credit card data, hotel negotiated rate data, and supplier-specific data to create a holistic picture of a travel programme.”
The platform uses AI to provide cognitive computing, integrated travel and expense data to help corporate travel managers optimise their travel programme, control spend, and enhance the end-traveller experience. It also uses predictive data analytics through ‘what-if’ scenarios.
Claudette explains: “For example, a travel manager can see what percentage of advance hotel bookings occur 0-6 days, 7-14 days and 15+ days from travel.” By running a ‘what-if’ scenario, she says, the travel manager can look at the cost differences, and possible savings that may occur if the travel manager moved, for example, 12% of total advance bookings from 0-6 days to 7-14 days.
The platform uses IBM Watson capabilities, delivered through the IBM Cloud, to track, manage, predict, and analyse travel costs in one place.
A statement announcing the development reads: “IBM Travel Manager gives users complete, unified access to previous siloed information, which, when combined with travel data from the Travelport global distribution system (GDS), is then used to create real-time predictive analytics recommending how adjustments in travel booking behaviour patterns can positively impact a company’s travel budget.”
Other features include an interactive dashboard; the ability to create alerts and notifications; predictive and pre-defined spend trend analysis; and natural language understanding to analyse text and uncover insights from structured and unstructured data.
The platform is expected to be commercially available to corporate customers globally, through both IBM and Travelport, with a limited commercial release in 2018 followed by a controlled commercial release in early 2019.
