Carlson Wagonlit Travel, the global travel management company, has launched CWT Travel Consolidator, an analytics tool that captures every part of an organization’s travel and expense spend, helping travel managers make the right decisions, and saving clients money.

“Gathering, matching, and reconciling travel and expense data is challenging and it’s often hard to get the full picture of the total cost of a trip,” says Christophe Renard, vice president, CWT Solutions Group. “CWT Travel Consolidator gives you that visibility – and can save up to 7% on travel costs.”

The new web-based platform combines air, hotel, and ground transport transactions booked through the TMC with credit card, expense, and HR data. This reveals the hidden costs of business travel and off-channel spend, enabling travel managers to identify missed savings opportunities, improve compliance, and increase organizations’ negotiating power with suppliers.

CWT Travel Consolidator’s data algorithms consolidate, standardize, and clean up the data, saving travel managers the time and hassle of having to fix inaccuracies. Having all their data on a single platform, with configurable dashboards and reporting capabilities, means travel programs can be more efficiently managed with all card, travel, and expense data integrated into one place.

Integrated data also provides valuable information on spending outside official channels such as flights and hotels booked on personal cards and poorly understood costs like airline seat selection charges, meals, laundry, and incidentals. CWT Travel Consolidator not only reveals these costs but also attaches them to the trips and travelers who incurred them. Costs can be then be cut, reported, and analyzed by trip, cost center, organizational structure, route, on vs off-channel, and supplier. That makes the data much more manageable, delivers insights, and ensures travel policies remain fit for purpose even as circumstances change.

A CWT-sponsored survey by the GBTA Foundation found that 64% of travel managers feel they don’t have enough data to calculate the total cost of a trip. Nearly three-quarters (73%) struggle to reconcile differences in reports due to data formatting, while 58% said they spend too much time reconciling and cleaning data.

To help travel managers get the most out of the tool, CWT has a team of 160 travel sourcing and optimization consultants who can advise clients, enabling them to make sense of their data and make informed decisions to improve their travel programs.

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