A personal hobby of Adam, our Director of Client Experience and Product Design, is reading about sports analytics, how we can break down, comprehend, and predict athletic performance using data. Adam says, “I’ve spent too many fall nights using advanced player stats to tweak my fantasy football team. (Surprisingly, I still have a few friends)”.

Michael Lewis’s Moneyball, often cited as the spark of the modern sports analytics revolution, tells the story of Billy Beane and the Oakland A’s, the underfunded baseball team that used data to rewrite the rules on player scouting and unlock underappreciated potential.

Suppose you’ve seen the 2011 Brad Pitt film. In that case, you’ll remember the “He Gets On Base” scene, the epiphany that on-base percentage mattered far more in evaluating players than the antiquated “eye-candy” scouting metrics all the old-timers relied on.

Beane’s revelation was about defining the right question. He stopped asking, “Does he look like a ballplayer?” and started asking, “Does he get on base?” That single, well-stated metric changed everything.

From Baseball to Business Travel

In our day job, navigating the world of travel & expense data, we’re long past the days when decisions are made on gut instinct. Data-driven decision-making is the norm. But defining good KPIs? That’s still a mixed bag.

At Unlocked Data, we see the same challenge: too much data, not enough actionable insight. Too often, managers are stuck with metrics that tell you what happened, but not why or what to do next.

So, taking a page from Billy Beane, let’s talk about what makes a useful savings focused KPI.

How to Spot a High-Value Savings KPI

When evaluating a KPI, we use three simple tests:

1. Behaviour: Does it measure a specific traveller action or decision, rather than an outcome?
2. Savings-Driven: Can you link changes in the metric directly to financial impact?
3. Relevant: Is there meaningful room for improvement or influence in your company?

If it passes these tests, it’s worth tracking. If it doesn’t, it might be noise dressed as insight.

Now, let’s look at two examples, one that moves the needle and one that just keeps score.

A Good KPI: Hotel Bookings Within Rate Cap

This KPI tracks how often travellers book hotels within approved rate limits. It’s simple, behavioural, and directly tied to cost control.

Each booking within the cap is a small win, and those wins add up fast. In practice, the metric identifies where travellers book above their city’s policy cap and tracks that difference as potential savings opportunities.

Because this measure isolates the behaviour that drives cost (booking within the cap outlined by company policy), it gives travel managers something they can act on, nudging traveller decisions toward better-value options. That’s the difference between measurement and management. It’s precise, meaningful, and measurable, exactly the kind of metric that gets your team “on base.”

A Misguided KPI: Average Room Rate (ARR)

ARR is what we call an Outcome Metric, a measure of the results produced by traveller choices. These kinds of measures, like total spend, number of travellers, or average room rate, provide valuable context and scale, allowing managers to compare performance across cities, hotel chains, or regions. They help explain what happened, but not why. They’re diagnostic, not prescriptive.

Every travel manager would love a lower ARR, just as every baseball club would love to win more games. But ARR alone doesn’t unlock the kind of insight that changes things. It doesn’t isolate traveller decisions or savings opportunities, and you can’t act directly on it tomorrow without deeper analysis. In baseball terms, it’s the final score, not the player recruitment.

The Unlocked Data Advantage: Unlocking Behavioural Data

Understanding which KPIs to track is only half the battle. The other half is getting the clean, consolidated data to track them accurately. Travel data is often messy, tangled between bookings, expenses, and refunds, which makes tracking behavioural metrics nearly impossible without the right tools.

At Unlocked Data, we clean, combine, and calculate data from disparate sources, ensuring the consistency that is vital for auditability and trusted insights. We’ve developed a unique solution specifically for the travel industry to upgrade analytics. This capability is what allows us to help travel managers move past static Average Room Rates and into dynamic, behaviour-based KPIs like 'Hotel Bookings Within Rate Cap' that drive real savings.

Conclusion: Define Before You Measure

Billy Beane revolutionised baseball scouting by redefining the problem. He focused on the metrics that actually won games.

The same principle applies to T&E analytics. Our dashboards are full of numbers, but only a few measure what really matters: traveller behaviour, cost efficiency, and opportunities to improve.

If you're ready to stop just reporting the score and start influencing the game, let's talk about how Unlocked Data can help you define and measure the behavioural KPIs that matter most to your business, balancing efficiency, sustainability, and employee well-being.

So next time you want to unlock a KPI that has the potential to drive savings, ask yourself:

1. Does it measure a behaviour you can influence?
2. Can you connect improvement to savings?
3. Is it meaningful enough to change?

---