Sharing Economy Data

As travelers use sharing economy vendors like Airbnb, Lyft and Uber more, travel managers need to capture this spend.

Pros & Cons: Usage trends help travel managers understand where travelers are and how avidly they use these services. Knowing about usage may force the corporate to create a policy on sharing economy vendors. Overall, the data is turnkey. Sharing economy providers have modern APIs and fairly standard data formats. Each source offers insight into only the one vendor.

Access/Formats: While sharing economy data can be captured through credit cards as individual charges, such vendors are natural data collectors. Several have partnered with expense systems to send the data via API connections as transactions occur, and some provide the data directly to corporates. The data also may be available through supplier dashboards, depending on the vendor.