In the early 2000s, Volkswagen wanted to sell "clean diesel" to crack the US market. The offer was the perfect vehicle: high performance, low emissions, and excellent fuel economy, all in one car.
At first the plan worked well. They marketed it and sales grew, with glowing reviews.
However, engineers knew it wasn't possible to maintain all three. If you tuned the engine for performance and fuel efficiency, the nitrogen oxide emissions were going to reach illegal levels.
So, instead of pulling the vehicle from the market, VW made a choice, and the engineers built a defeat device. This software could test the vehicles in the lab and turn off emission controls so that they passed the tests, but in the real world they would still be emitting 40 times the legal limit.
When independent researchers tested these vehicles in real conditions, the truth came out. Initially, VW tried to deny it. Millions of cars were affected, trust was destroyed in the VW brand, executives resigned or went to jail, and over a thousand premature deaths were linked to excess emissions.
The Lesson
When data is manipulated to perform rather than tell the truth, trust dies. When you first start to review all your data, you're likely to surface one uncomfortable data point that shows a pitfall within your services, products or processes.
Now, we aren't saying Travel Managers are running defeat devices. But we see a softer version of this all the time in buyer-supplier travel partnerships.
Dashboards that quietly hide service failures. Leakage that's "explained away" with footnotes no one reads. Compliance numbers that look suspiciously perfect every single quarter. Everyone smiles in the QBR, but nobody really trusts the numbers.
And here's the thing: your clients know. They might not say it out loud. They might not challenge you in the meeting. But they know when the data's been massaged to look good rather than be honest.
Once they lose trust in your data, they lose trust in you. And that relationship, no matter how polished the PowerPoint, is over. You just don't know it yet.
In your own reporting and reviews:
- Don't hide uncomfortable data
- Don't "smooth out" the story
- Acknowledge it honestly: "This isn't pretty, but it's real. Let's fix it together."