Six hundred. That's how many different ways one Paris hotel showed up in a single company's travel data during a recent Grasp analysis. Same property, same program, 600 names.
Now imagine handing that data to an AI tool and asking it which hotels you should renegotiate next year.
Everyone in travel and meetings is talking about AI right now. But AI isn't the starting point. Connected, accurate, usable data is. Get the foundation right, and AI becomes a genuine force multiplier. Skip it, and AI simply makes your existing mess faster and more confident.
The real problem: too many versions of the truth
Most organizations aren't short on data. Travel data sits in the TMC, the online booking tool, expense, corporate card, supplier feeds, and HR. Meetings data is often harder to reach still, scattered across inboxes, spreadsheets, and individual planners' memories.
The trouble is that none of it lines up. Each source captures information differently, uses different supplier names, and tells a slightly different story. So when finance asks a simple question like "What's our actual cost per trip?" or "How much did we spend on internal meetings last year?", the answer takes three spreadsheets, a handful of emails, and several people.
That fragmentation carries real costs:
Missed savings. When nobody can see total spend, volume discounts and chain partnerships go unused, and supplier negotiations start from a weaker position.
Contract exposure. Small and mid-sized meetings are often booked by admins alongside their day jobs. A missed attrition or cancellation clause on a six-figure event becomes a real liability.
Lost knowledge. When the planner who knew which venues worked leaves the company, that knowledge goes with them.
Slower decisions. Travel and meetings leaders spend more time validating numbers than acting on them, and every report goes out with a disclaimer attached.
Why AI won't fix it on its own
It's tempting to see AI as the shortcut past messy data. In practice, it works the other way around. Three common assumptions are worth retiring:
Go back to that hotel with 600 names. An AI tool reading that data doesn't see one property. It sees 600. Ask it where to focus your next negotiation, and it will answer confidently and wrongly. If that answer ends up in front of your CFO, the problem isn't the AI. It's the foundation underneath it.
What a sound foundation looks like
A foundation AI can build on has three qualities.
It's normalized. Supplier names, travelers, and transactions are cleaned so that one Hilton is one Hilton. Building a report on top of good data is the easy part. Getting the data right is the hard part, and it's where the value lives.
It's governed. Everyone agrees on which source is the source of truth for each question. Without that agreement, AI can't answer confidently, and neither can you.
It's connected across the full journey. A hotel stay is booked in one system, paid in another, and expensed in a third. Rates may not match what's loaded in the GDS. A traveler may upgrade to a suite. Any single source tells only part of the story, so the full picture comes from reconciling all of them.
The same principles apply to meetings. Past hotel contracts, legal redlines, typical pricing, and venue preferences are all data. Captured in one place, they turn into institutional knowledge: a company that prefers boutique hotels under 100 rooms within walking distance of the office no longer has to re-learn that with every event. With that context in place, AI can take on real work, from sourcing venues to applying standard contract terms automatically.
How Grasp builds the foundation
Grasp has spent three decades doing exactly this: turning scattered travel data into a single source of truth.
For TMCs and agencies: graspDATA centralizes, cleans, and standardizes data across back-office systems and booking sources. The result is accurate mid- and back-office data, client-ready reporting, and an AI-ready foundation that positions your TMC as a strategic partner rather than a booking channel.
For corporate travel, finance, and procurement teams: graspCORPORATE DATA SERVICES unifies data from TMCs, booking tools, cards, expense, and suppliers into a governed, enterprise-ready data layer. Custom data pipelines and secure warehousing give you one source of truth for reporting today and AI use cases tomorrow.
What becomes possible
Once the foundation is solid, AI stops being a buzzword and starts changing how programs run.
Travel and finance finally agree. Travel numbers and finance numbers rarely match today. Reconciled data ends the debate and shows where spend stands against budget.
Budgets become predictive. If you're eight months into the year but have used ten months of budget, you know early enough to act.
Meetings and travel become one program. Procurement can see total meeting demand alongside transient travel, and use that combined volume as leverage with suppliers.
The true cost of a meeting is knowable. Flights, room blocks, ground transport, and vendor invoices can be matched to a single event instead of being pieced together from expense reports after the fact.
Risk management gets proactive. Duty of care, compliance, and fraud prevention shift from reacting to problems toward spotting them early.
Each of those depends on the same thing: data you can trust before AI ever touches it.
Where to start, even with a small team
Building the foundation doesn't require a large budget. It requires doing the right things first.
Make data your first investment. It makes everything after it easier, from answering internal requests to measuring results. Smaller programs need it most, since they have the fewest people available for manual reconciliation. The goal is to have the data working for you, not you working at the data.
Bring in a partner that knows how to normalize it. Aggregating and cleaning travel data is specialized work, and the right partner gets you there faster than building it in-house.
Scale yourself before you scale headcount. Identify the repetitive work you can hand to a system so your time goes toward higher-value decisions.
Involve the people who will use the tools. New processes fail when they add hoops for planners and admins. Bring them in early, and adoption tends to follow on its own.
Measure more than savings. A strong program delivers across operational excellence, risk mitigation, sourcing, and traveler experience. Showing value in all four is how travel and meetings move from an administrative function to a strategic one.
Go deeper: watch The Hidden Cost of Fragmentation
We recently teamed up with Nowadays for a webinar on this exact topic. Grasp CEO Maria Chevalier brought the transient travel perspective from more than 30 years in the industry, including three stints in the buyer's seat. Nowadays CEO and co-founder Anna Sun brought the meetings perspective. In the recording, you'll hear:
The story behind "Smoothie-gate," and what one meeting's expense data revealed once someone finally pieced it together
A study on whether travelers actually used free hotel breakfast, and what the answer meant for sourcing
How one 5,000-person company went from a single assistant planning one meeting to 80% of employees on managed offsites in five months
Practical advice on making the business case for travel and meetings to leadership
AI is coming to every corner of travel and meetings. The organizations that benefit most will be the ones that built a sound foundation first.
