The latest expense trends report shows a revolution in paid car rides nationally, with Uber overtaking taxi cabs in two major U.S. cities.

It’s always interesting to read into the data produced by Certify or indeed any of the expense management companies.  It warms by heart to see that travel continues to be a plethora of enigmas.

Certify recenty released its Q1 2015 report on business expense trends and looking at the numbers it interest to see a common theme;

• The top two most expensed restaurants are not in the top two most rated
• The top two most expensed hotels are not in the top two most rated
• The top two most expensed airlines are not in the top two most rated

And I have to say a HUGE congratulations to Enterprise who managed to be the ONLY company who were top expensed and top rated.

With the exception of Enterprise, there is a gargantuan question of here.. why are we travelling with airlines / renting cars / eating in places / sleeping in beds that we don’t rate particularly highly but we book regularly….???

The following reasons come to mind

• Route choice – maybe the top rated airlines don’t fly the routes we want
• Hotel choice – maybe the top rated hotels are not in the cities we want
• Restaurant choice – maybe the food places we like are not in the locations we visit

However more likely is that the travel policy of the organisations these folks work for has not been updated to reflect their travellers feedback.  A surprisingly common problem is that travel policies are stagnant, they’re a check box exercise that once done gets filed or stuck on the company extranet.  A travel programme has to reflect the needs of all stakeholders and it needs to be reviewed regularly else we’ll keep seeing stats like these from Certify that simply are an enigma.  We concur with Robert Neveu, CEO of Certify when he says “The business community is looking for value and convenience, and at the same time this is a group that is interested in innovation.  Ridesharing services are making inroads into corporate budgets because they combine all of those things.” 

The rise in popularity of Uber is not surprising at all, I’d be extremely interested to see the age group where the most growth has come from.  I’d be willing to bet that the increase is mostly made up from millennial travellers who are more comfortable with new concepts / products.  In addition the partnership of Uber and Concur Travel must have been a huge boost for them. 

To see the data live online go here: http://www.certify.com/CertifySpendSmartReport.aspx. 

Franc Jeffrey, CEO EQ Travel