Hotel leakage

Hotel leakage occurs when your travelers are booking accommodation outside your program. It can be identified by looking at your program’s hotel attachment rate. Hotel attachment is a metric used to show how often a hotel was booked with Amex GBT Select versus an overnight air booking. It’s critical for duty of care and optimizing spend. In addition, you can also:

• Review the Missed Opportunity report in your reporting tool that lists overnight flights without an attached hotel.
• Check traveler booking behavior: Low hotel spend near your company headquarters could be a sign that travelers are booking outside of your program.
• Check the number of bookings and split between online and offline transactions. Lower online adoption doesn’t necessarily mean leakage if offline transactions have increased though. A period comparison (e.g., year-over-year) can provide more context to online adoption.
  

To create an efficient hotel program, use this guide.

Air leakage

Airline leakage occurs when travelers book air travel outside your program. Using your reporting tool, you’ll have visibility into traveler booking behavior.

• If there’s significant hotel transactions but lower air transactions, your travelers are likely booking directly.
• In some countries travelers prefer rail to air travel, so you should also consider rail bookings when reviewing this data. 
• Another way to identify air leakage is to compare last year’s employee air expenses with last year’s total air spend reporting data.

Understand your traveler behavior

Once you’ve identified potential leakage sources, dig deeper:

• Ask travelers for their reasons.
• Identify the top reasons: Is it a lack of content or training, a policy that’s too restrictive, or are the benefits of managed travel unclear?
• Use this data and work with your client general manager (CGM) to reevaluate your program.