Companies of every size risk tremendous annual budget losses through unmanaged travel activity. These companies look for ways to prevent ‘leakage’ and opportunities for cost savings. Controlling spend to achieve contracted terms and policy compliance is fundamental to effective travel management.

“Typically, travel and entertainment (T&E) is the second largest controllable expense after salaries and benefits, and yet companies worldwide are overwhelmed with huge amounts of travel spend data requiring expense reconciliation,” said Richard Crum, Group Head for Travel & Entertainment, Global Commercial Products & Solutions, MasterCard. “With minimal upfront investment and systems integration, Travel Controller gives companies the opportunity to remedy this pain point.”

Travel Controller provides an integrated solution for issuers, Travel Management Companies (TMCs) and their corporate clients. It is unique in its functionality to match and reconcile 100% of central travel expenses to booking data. The solution also provides companies with the data needed to allocate charges to the appropriate cost centers and allows companies to expand their control over travel spend by setting custom virtual accounts for each transaction.

• Travel Controller product features and benefits, highlighted in the video here, include: Using unique virtual account numbers for each transaction guarantees 100% match of travel booking data to the card transaction.
• The detail and company-specific data necessary to manage travel expenses is captured when travel is booked, and linked to the unique virtual account number.
• The travel expense reconciliation is simplified by ensuring that companies get the specific data they need to integrate automatically into the expense management and ERP systems.
• Because the booking data is linked to a unique card number, Travel Controller can ensure that the detailed information is available on both the original transaction as well as on credit and on refunds – something very difficult to manage on a typical “lodged” card.
• A Travel Controller transaction seamlessly integrates into a company’s expense management system to ensure managers have visibility over the total cost of a business trip.

Travel Controller is currently being piloted with select banks, TMCs and end corporate customers, and will be commercially available in early 2014.