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Travel expense analytics: What it is and how to set it up
Learn what travel expense analytics is, which KPIs to track, and how to set it up in 7 steps.
Travel expense analytics is the practice of collecting, cleaning, and analyzing your company’s travel and expense (T&E) data, such as airfare, lodging, ground transportation, and meals, to reduce costs, enforce policies, and plan budgets.
This guide contains:
- How travel expense analytics works
- Benefits of travel expense analytics
- How to set up travel expense analytics in seven steps (and which KPIs to track)
If your team travels internationally, Holafly for Business keeps employees online with secure mobile data and without surprise roaming charges.
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How travel expense analytics works
Travel expense analytics runs in four stages:
- Collect data from corporate cards, booking tools, expense reports, and invoices.
- Normalize vendor names, categories, currencies, and dates (as the same vendor can show up under three different names across cards, bookings, and invoices).
- Analyze data for patterns by department, supplier, destination, and time period.
- Act on insights to adjust rate caps or negotiate corporate discounts with vendors.
What travel expense analytics can do for your travel program
According to a Forbes Insights survey commissioned by American Express, 81% of executives frequently use analytics to optimize costs.
Here’s how you can benefit from travel expense analytics:
- Lower travel costs: Analytics shows where your spend piles up, so you can test targeted changes.
- Improve policy compliance: Alerts at the point of booking (e.g., a mobile alert when a booking exceeds a spending limit) keep travelers in policy before they confirm their bookings.
- Strengthen vendor sourcing and negotiation: High booking volume with a single hotel chain gives you leverage to secure a corporate rate.
- Budget and forecast with more confidence: Historical and seasonal data help you forecast travel demand, and predictive tools can flag budget overruns before the month-end close.
- Reduce traveler risk: Tracking travel patterns helps you spot risks to traveler safety (see our guides to business travel risks and business duty of care).
Travel expense analytics delivers the highest ROI when travel volume is high, spend is spread across many departments, and your team reconciles expenses by hand.
However, given that analytics requires card access and staff time, it may not pay off if you have fewer than 50 traveling employees, T&E makes up less than 2% of your operating costs, your card, booking, and expense data aren’t connected yet, or an enterprise-wide spend analysis program already covers T&E.
How to set up travel expense analytics in 7 steps
Setting up travel expense analytics requires a good process to ensure your data is actionable. Follow these seven steps to build a reliable tracking system for your organization:
- Set your goals and KPIs (more on that in the next section).
- Start with your largest, cleanest data source, which is typically corporate card data. Then, layer in expense reports and booking data.
- Bring bookings, card charges, reimbursements, and receipts into one reporting flow.
- Require trip fields for purpose, traveler or guest, department, and project.
- Encourage employees to upload receipts as they go and to use consistent expense categories.
- Share insights with department heads, travel managers, and procurement.
- Turn findings into updates to your company travel expense policy every quarter, and measure the impact in the next cycle.
Travel expense analytics: KPIs to track
You’ll want to define your KPIs before building dashboards in Data Studio.
Here’s what you can measure:
| KPI | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Total spend | How all T&E costs by category compare with your budget |
| Cost per trip | What a business trip costs on average, ideally by destination |
| Policy compliance rate | What share of bookings and claims follow your policy |
| Advance-booking lead time | How far in advance employees book trips |
| Preferred vendor compliance | What share of bookings go to your negotiated partners |
| Supplier concentration | How much of your spend goes to each supplier |
| Off-channel booking rate | What share of trips employees book outside your booking tool |
Give traveling employees secure data with Holafly for Business
When your team travels for business, secure mobile data is key.
Holafly for Business is a business eSIM provider available in 160+ destinations, activating on your team’s devices so they don’t have to worry about local SIM cards or roaming charges. You also get access to our centralized management platform, the Holafly Business Center, where you can manage individual eSIMs, invoices, and data usage.
Holafly Plans for Business come in four tiers, all featuring hotspot, 4G/5G, and 24/7 multilingual support:
- Daily: Unlimited data with pay-per-day flexibility, built for short business trips under 16 days a month.
- Monthly: Unlimited data for teams traveling more than 16 days a month, a fit for frequent travelers and long-term remote staff.
- Annual: Unlimited data for ultra-frequent travelers, suited to long-term global operations and predictable annual budgets.
- Enterprise: Bespoke plans for companies managing travel for 20+ employees a year, with volume discounts, a dedicated account manager, priority support, and custom integrations, built to optimize costs, streamline operations, and ensure seamless global connectivity across teams.
Not sure which plan is right for your team? Book a demo.
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FAQ
A travel expense is an ordinary and necessary cost of traveling away from home for business, according to IRS Publication 463. It covers transportation, lodging, and meals on overnight trips, baggage, dry cleaning, business calls, and tips.
Expensify is a good travel expense tracker for small teams that need to scan receipts. SAP Concur and Navan suit larger companies that want travel booking and expense tracking on a single platform.
I’m a writer with over eight years of experience in digital content. My work has appeared in publications such as The New York Times, Forbes, Business Insider, and the BBC. At Holafly, I write clear, practical guides to help travelers stay connected with eSIM technology. In my spare time, I enjoy car detailing, biking around Warsaw, and capturing portraits.
