Travel agents to offer useful new reports.
For those of us who remain in the undecided camp about fractional jets programs, we soon might be able to turn to our travel agencies for help, based on a recent Business Travel News article.The article highlights FlightStats data reports, which allow agents to view an air carrier’s historical on-time performance and receive flight disruption alerts. These reports have been used for several years through very limited agency channels. Now the Web-based performance tracker will participate in the global distribution system (GDS), hugely increasing its availability for corporate travelers.
Plus, FlightStats aims to launch a new product by the end of this summer (and this is the one that could prod your decision-making). “Trip Outcome” is an analytical tool which “examines a corporation’s passenger name records for a specified time period and measures the number of delays and cancellations to which a company’s travelers were subjected.” It can even tally lost man-hours due to flight disruptions. Trip Outcome reports are expected to be distributed to corporate customers via their travel management agencies
Just think: If we were presented with totals of our own, or our entire company’s, hours lost to the black hole of commercial flight inefficiency, we might easily translate those hours to dollars and weigh those dollars against the cost of utilizing fractional jets.
