By: David J. Wardell

© 1991 By: David J. Wardell.  Reproduction or redistribution in any form without written permission is strictly prohibited.

In addition to travel purchasing services, most successful travel agencies provide some level of general reporting to their customers.

The actual ability to deliver results consistent with ever-increasing customer expectations varies considerably among agencies and is often constrained by inadequate systems, management and technology.

Many larger agencies have been examining new technology tools as possible mechanisms for addressing these challenges.

These tools, while very useful, are only part of the solution required to meet customer expectations.

Central to understanding a travel agency’s reporting challenge is the fact that customers naturally assume an agency has the technological and management ability to deliver timely, accurate and meaningful reports.

None of these is necessarily true.

Among the first obstacles most travel agencies must overcome are those imposed by travel industry accounting computer systems.

Despite their technical age, most of these systems rely upon outdated, inefficient designs that are inconsistent with reporting requirements.

In the computer industry, the term MIS, for management in-formation system, is used to refer to a system that is used to support decision making in as timely a manner as possible.

Because travel computerization originated with accounting systems, most travel reporting systems have tended to look at MIS as a byproduct of the accounting process.

This is inconsistent with the information customers require today and with the range of data and analysis that travel agencies are expected to provide.

For example, the 30-day accounting cycle is irrelevant to some customer MIS needs and may substantially delay the need for timely decision-support reports.

MIS tied to an accounting cycle usually can do nothing more than summarize expenses after it is too late to control them.

Most accounting-based reports are built to facilitate producing detail instead of meaningful summaries, because detail is important to the accounting process.

This is one reason that most agency accounting system report generation programs lack such features as logical queries.

The logical operators and, not, or, else, allow reporting programs to segregate data elements that pertain to specific situations by excluding or including those elements that match logical tests (for example, include data that have A and B but not C).

Disconnecting report generation from the accounting system can reduce these limitations. Data can be transferred to an independent computer where modern reporting programs and data organization techniques can be applied.

Once the transfer is complete, however, the potentially more serious problem of report design must be addressed.

Most travel agency customer reports are ill conceived and uninformative — a situation that can be corrected with more intelligent planning.

This is perhaps best illustrated by one of the most popular travel agency documents, the fare savings report.

This report attempts to detail individual savings achieved on requested customer trips by comparing actual ticketed amounts with a reference "full coach" fare that represents the alternative; the "savings" is defined as the difference between the two.

This is probably one of the silliest reports ever designed.

What it really shows is how much you would have spent if you were stupid enough to pay the full coach fare. It has no practical management value.

Sophisticated customer reports have several major properties:

• They have a theme. MIS should be summary-oriented unless there is a specific reason for detail to be included.  Summaries need a purpose: Will they show exceptions or demonstrate compliance? Will they describe the behavior of individual travelers, departments or companies?  Reports produced simply for the sake of producing reports have limited MIS value.
  
• They convey a message. Informative reports describe trends, illustrate relationships and portray behavior.  A good reason not to produce a report is if you cannot explain what specifically a customer will understand after having read it.
  
• They have substance. Reports should be understood, not cause confusion.  While this is frequently best accomplished through a heavy reliance upon graphics, which are easier for most people to understand, this is not always true.  The appropriate medium for delivering the message should be used whatever it is.

Management of the reporting process is one area where creativity and skillful management can still overcome size and perceived technological sophistication in delivery of a superior result.