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Partnership Travel Consulting, LLC (PTC) and the National Business Travel Association (NBTA) announced a unique partnership on the newly-launched Travel Sourcing Indexsm (TSI), the first supplier review system of its kind designed for use in managed travel programs. The TSI allows corporate travel purchasers to make more informed procurement decisions using their peers’ ratings, rankings and reviews of travel services providers. The TSI was developed by Andrew Menkes, CEO, and Evan Newman, CTO, of PTC, which also developed the Managed Travel Index for the NBTA Foundation in 2005. NBTA supported the development of the TSI, and NBTA members will have complimentary access to the subscription-based tool for two years.
The TSI is only available to travel purchasers and it provides them the ability to cast their votes on the service and quality metrics provided by airlines, hotels, car rental companies, online booking tools, travel management companies (TMCs) and major airports around the world. The tool will provide customized reporting that allows the user to filter responses by industry, geography and size of T&E program to ensure that peer benchmarking is relevant.
“We appreciate NBTA’s early support of the TSI, and without that help it may never have been launched,” said Menkes. “I first presented this concept to the NBTA Board in November of 2008, and they were extremely responsive and enthusiastic about the product. We made sure that we also had buy-in from the supplier side having presented the concept to NBTA’s Allied Leadership Council prior to implementing the tool.”
NBTA President & CEO, Kevin Maguire, CCTE, GLP, said, “NBTA is pleased to be able to offer our travel manager members complimentary access to this unique tool to help them drive greater travel value for their companies.”
A customized version of the TSI is available to individual companies who want to acquire granular detail from travelers and travel arrangers specific to preferred suppliers and individual hotel properties. This data – like all TSI data – is masked to protect the identity of the respondents, but it is rolled up into a master database so that the ratings of thousands of travelers can be calibrated to identify individual property and airport ratings as well as the usability of the online booking tools, etc.
The TSI will identify the total T&E spend represented by the responses and once the membership base exceeds $1Billion in T&E, the data reporting dashboard will be made available to the early subscribers of the tool. “We plan on launching the full version of the tool at the NBTA International Convention & Exposition in San Diego in August of this year,” added Menkes.
Theodore is the Co-Founder and Managing Editor of TravelDailyNews Media Network; his responsibilities include business development and planning for TravelDailyNews long-term opportunities.
