Airfare and hotel price tracking specialist Yapta has launched a hotel analytics tool for optimising corporate supplier negotiations and policy compliance.
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Yapta launches AI hotel analytics tool for corporate travel buyers
Airfare and hotel price tracking specialist Yapta has launched a hotel analytics tool for optimising corporate supplier negotiations and policy compliance.
TravelAI combines real-time hotel availability data and machine learning to identify areas of focus where companies can create or improve opportunities to save.
Yapta says the solution delivers “actionable insight into supplier utilisation and performance, contract rate performance, and travel policy effectiveness”.
TravelAI also aggregates anonymous hotel pricing data across the millions of travel itineraries tracked by Yapta, creating benchmarks by spend amount, geography, industry and supplier.
Valerie Layman, chief product and services officer at Yapta, said: “Travel managers are demanding insights that are prescriptive and actionable.
“TravelAI highlights exactly where the contract rate and policy breakage occurs and allows issues to be addressed immediately.
“Because the solution examines all available rates at the time of booking, it provides travel managers with clear guidance on whether a traveller made a decision to book a higher rate or premium room type when a standard contract room rate is available or if the supplier is not performing.”
Yapta customers in a TravelAI early adopter scheme have used the tool to measure the competitiveness of their contracted rates by comparing them to booked rates, pricing benchmarks, and the best available rates (BAR).
The data provides actionable insights throughout the year, highlights issues with suppliers and where negotiations are failing.
Travel managers can implement and enforce policies that encourage booking lowest standard available rates and TravelAI provides complete transparency into vendor re-booking behaviour.
Jeff Daily, director of global travel at Sanmina, said: “With the added visibility of all available rates and the ability to validate booked rates and lower rates that may become available against our corporate negotiated rates, we are now more confident when determining whether our suppliers are performing as contracted – and we have a better feel for how well our travellers are complying with policy.
“TravelAI is helping us easily identify which rate types and which properties best support our travel program, our strategies, and can assist in influencing traveller behaviour.”
James Filsinger, president and chief executive of Yapta added: “TravelAI is quite literally transforming the way contracted travel spend gets managed and sourced.
“Travel buyers can now have the confidence that they are sourcing with the right suppliers, at the right rates, in the right markets – all while having Yapta’s price assurance tools working in the background.”
TravelAI is available to customers 24/7 via web portal access and also as an app, bundled with the Tableau app currently found in The App Store. Yapta plans to roll out TravelAI for airfare in Q2 2019.
