This is the time of year you’ll find me up a ladder, screwdriver in hand, attaching about 28 billion Christmas lights to Château Wylie.

Oh, and then there are the large, illuminated items in the garden: a tree, a penguin, a reindeer, a massive Santa… all producing enough wattage to be seen by anyone lucky enough to be holidaying on Neptune.

I say lucky because festive lights are not really my thing to be honest. I would rather be inside doing a little quality control, checking on the brandy I’ll be using to set fire to the pudding on Christmas Day – another unmissable tradition in the Wylie household. 

However, other members of the family love them and we do have to keep up with the neighbours. Yuletide lighting has become a competitive sport in our corner of Lowestoft. Every year I feel obliged to add another object you can hang strings of bulbs on in the garden. This time, I’m eyeing up a sleigh for Santa.

But what, I hear you ask, do travel managers want Santa to bring them for Christmas? The answer, I believe, is data consolidation.

Looking back over the last 12 months, I’ve noticed that more and more travel managers have been talking to us, seeking informal advice because they want to better understand how technology could cure pain points in their travel programmes. Chief among these, I would say, is leakage from the official travel policy. 

During the Covid years, travellers had to stay disciplined and book through their company’s official booking tool or TMC. Now that discipline is breaking down again. Rightly or wrongly, like it or not, travellers are increasingly booking off-channel through public websites and apps.

For a whole host of reasons, it’s very hard to stop travellers booking off-piste, which means travel managers need instead to find a way to track that maverick spend.

There are sources that can deliver this kind of data, such as corporate card spend. But what’s frustrating travel managers (and one I mentor through ITM is experiencing this exact problem) is that all too often their TMCs are not providing the technology to merge on- and off-channel spend data, even though such tools do exist.

I reckon travel managers in 2025 will put their foot down and tell their TMCs to start offering the multi-channel data formatting and consolidation they so badly need.

Unlike the front garden of Wylie Towers, off-channel bookings are a place where we need to see a lot more light being let in.

I am sure that will come, but for now have a great Christmas, and may all your puddings be soaked in brandy too.

Scott Wylie is Chief Technology Officer at TripStax