An important part of Egencia’s™ (part of Expedia Group™) travel management offer is the configuration and usage of travel policies, offering our clients control and flexibility over their corporate travel program. These policies allow our clients to regulate employee travel choices, for reasons related to savings, comfort or safety.

Clients can flag flight booking options that are too expensive, business or first class, or last minute, among others. On our web platform, we mark these out of policy options on the search results pages with a red flag. Below is an example of a flight from Paris to Marseille that’s out of policy because it’s too expensive.

— Source: Expedia Group, Inc.— Source: Expedia Group, Inc.
— Source: Expedia Group, Inc.

While we’ve always believed such policies add value, we wanted to precisely quantify their influence on traveller behaviour. So we turned to data and robust statistical analysis techniques.

Our big questions

The main questions were:

  • Are policy rules linked to changes in client spending?
  • Are policy rules impacting traveller comfort?
  • Are policy rules affecting traveller convenience?

Using data to better understand how these policies impact our clients and travellers allows us to make more informed decisions and to improve the clarity of our value proposition to our clients regarding the usage of policies.

There are eight air policies that may be applied, including:

  • Price above Recommended Fare and Fixed Price Air Policy:set reasonable spending limits on a flight fare (the first one is a limit on top of the price of our recommended fare for the search, and the second one is a maximum price).
  • Advance Purchase: controls how long in advance flights should be booked.
  • Highest Cabin Class: regulates the cabin classes that can be selected by travellers (e.g., business, economy).

We analysed the impact of all air policies, but the ones mentioned above provided the most interesting results. All of these policies can be configured in different ways depending on the settings considered. It’s important to mention that policies are often used together, so when analysing the effect of a certain policy, we were aware of the potential confounding effects of other policies.

Published by Eugen Patrascu on medium.com

Read the full article at Expedia Group, Inc.