Bailey’s vision of predictive booking and frictionless travel experiences defines a lot of the machine learning and artificial intelligence efforts happening on the front end of travel management at Microsoft.
“The simplest way to look at [what we’re trying to do with machine
learning and AI] is to remember what a real conversation with a good
travel agent used to be like,” he said.
Rodriguez Martinez picked up the thread: “Imagine if you had a ma-
chine that was intelligent enough to know when you’re traveling, all
your preferences, all your passions and prompted you to book because
the machine saw a meeting on the calendar: ‘I can see you’re traveling.
You normally take this flight. You can make it on time for the meeting.
This is the price. Do you want me to book it for you—yes or no?’ And
then you are done.”
Rodriguez Martinez acknowledged that such a frictionless front-end
experience is a longer-term goal. “But there are a lot of corporate use
cases for machine learning and AI when it comes to strategic decision-
making. We can do that right now.”
She delivers deep data intelligence to Microsoft category managers to
inform sourcing and contracting discussions. Armed for the first time
with persona data, Microsoft global travel sourcing manager Diane Lun-
deen Smith will initiate her airline RFP process this summer, but she
already has leveraged deeper intelligence in day-to-day supplier man-
agement. “With Marta’s help, I look at scorecards to track [program]
performance in different areas: standard cost savings, account manage-
ment and procurement measurements,” Smith said. Contract utiliza-
tion is a new report that allows Smith to look at how often the Microsoft
deals she negotiates are actually used by travelers.
“You can look at a [general] marketshare picture for a partner airline, for
example, and not know how much of that was [the Microsoft] deal versus a
published fare, Web fare, agency fare or some other rate,” Smith said. With
machines crunching the numbers and comparing all transactions on that
airline against contracted rates, Smith gets clarity around the value of her
work with that partner.
The next step is to get details: Why isn’t the contract being used or what
has changed with the supplier or with the business need? This is where
Rodriguez Martinez’s work with unstructured data can come into play.
She consolidates feedback from Microsoft’s internal social feed, stan-
dard travel surveys and CRM data to create a picture of what Microsoft
travelers think about suppliers. Rodriguez Martinez said she can look at
this voice of the traveler data to uncover traveler concerns. Plus, she said,
“they drop a lot of hints about their supplier loyalty.”
Smith used this unstructured data recently to settle what she called “a
dust up” with Emirates in October. “They had made changes with pre-
assigned seating and the amount of baggage you can bring. Marta’s Voice
of the Traveler data enabled me to approach Emirates with traveler ver-
batims and clearly articulate the issues we were facing.” That Smith was
able to show the travelers were valuable customers to Emirates drove her
case home. “I was able to recommend alternatives that would benefit our
travelers and negotiate a solution that was particularly important to those
who travel extensively in Emirates’ markets.”
DEVELOPING DATA INSIGHTS
Rodriguez Martinez hails from travel data intelligence firm Pi, which
cleanses, normalizes and crunches travel data for corporate clients. The ex-
perience honed her deep data skills before her arrival at Microsoft. Even so,
At Microsoft, developing new
data insights is a collaborative
effort, and getting from ques-
tions to answers isn’t always a
clean process. “We brainstorm
a lot and we come up with more
ideas and we sidetrack a lot but
then carry on,” Rodriguez Marti-
nez said.
Smith underscored the sense
of discovery. “Those are my fa-
vorite sessions: when we are run-
ning different queries and I say,
‘ Wait, can it do this?’ I don’t know
everything that is possible with
the data, so I often don’t know
where we are going to end up.”
Rodriguez Martinez, Smith and
Microsoft global travel experience
lead Julia Fidler recently collabo-
rated to evaluate how travelers in
different countries perceive the
negotiated rates offered through
Microsoft’s managed channels.
Fidler and Smith wanted to un-
derstand, per country, if better
“The data
is not just
about
taking; it’s
also about
giving information
to suppliers.
That’s
how I see
the way
forward. In
terms of
machine
learning
and un-derstand-ing our
travelers,
suppliers
can learn
from what
we have to
offer.”
Marta
Rodriguez
Martinez
Microsoft
