Egencia has added a duty-of-care feature to its online booking tool, designed to give corporate travel managers and travelers access to alerts and advisories related to the Covid-19 pandemic and other potential risk factors, as well as a data tool to gauge industry-wide travel trends, the company announced.
Dubbed Egencia Travel Advisor, the feature provides such information as travel restrictions, entrance requirements and self-quarantine policies for particular destinations, integrated directly into the travel booking process. Travel Advisor also includes information on the hygiene standards of their chosen hotel, car, air or rail provider, according to Egencia.
Beyond the individual-trip use case, Travel Advisor is designed to help travel managers and other corporate leaders make travel policy decisions and adjustments based on the latest developments and risk factors, the company said.
To further assist that process, another new Egencia tool enables managers to access and visualize business travel trends based on monthly global travel booking data. Available to all organizations, including those that aren't Egencia clients, the trend tracker enables managers to explore corporate booking trends in a specific country or industry sector to understand how similar organizations are operating.
Meanwhile, Egencia also has bolstered its ability to provide clients with insights into program-specific data—a capability that has grown increasingly important as companies seek to gauge return on investment for travel and seek efficiencies and savings opportunities amid ongoing economic uncertainty stemming from the Covid pandemic.
The company's recent work in that area includes new dashboards to track raw data on bookings, unused tickets and airline refunds, as well as a new reporting API to connect that data with other systems, such as expense management, duty-of-care service providers and HR systems.
"We're continuing to expand and enhance our APIs to give customers flexible options for retrieving booking and transaction-level data in near real time" an Egencia spokesperson said. The raw data and API tools provide "multiple avenues for retrieving and analyzing data to help travel managers dig deeper into their travel performance and behaviors and mitigate financial risk," the spokesperson added.