Quantum Metric’s Danielle Harvey discusses: The company’s role in business travel data analysis

The effect of constant news on forecasting

Why airline safety shouldn’t be overlooked as a demand factor

Digital analytics platform Quantum Metric captures and analyzes customer data from online and other tech-enabled shopping and buying experiences. The company’s position in the buying ecosystem offers it some insight into the trends surrounding business travel purchasing,

Quantum Metric global VP and head of travel and hospitality strategy Danielle Harvey earlier this month told BTN managing editor Chris Davis. And the first quarter of 2025 made clear that business travel buying behavior was on the wane. Edited excerpts follow.

BTN: What does Quantum Metric do?

Danielle Harvey: We’re a digital analytics platform, and we help businesses understand and improve their digital customer experiences. Our platform is deployed on the web, mobile apps, kiosks, things like that. We capture really detailed user interactions across those platforms. Then we enable brands to specifically replay customer sessions, analyze the journeys, identify where they’re struggling, where there’s friction in those journeys, and then quantify the impact of those to the business.

BTN: How does that translate into your overall assessment of the state of corporate demand?

Harvey: Because we’re capturing all of that data, we can look at that in aggregate and understand visibility into, for airlines, corporate versus leisure travel. We can roll up all that data, anonymize it, and then understand trends in year-over-year, month-over-month, quarter-over-quarter performance of key areas around revenue, conversion rates, how many people are looking versus booking, and then across that portfolio understand that performance. We also augment that with surveys, so we’ll also send surveys out into the space and collect traditional survey response data.

Travel in general has been pretty resilient over the last couple of years. This isn’t the first time that there’s been some economic uncertainty, but it is the first time that we’re seeing travel starting to get impacted by that.”

BTN: In terms of corporate demand, what are actually seeing at this point?

Harvey: We’ve been seeing a little bit of softening in corporate travel demand. So in particular we’re seeing conversion rates—the number of people who are looking to book, and then actually booking—have been a little bit softer in Q1 and then carrying into Q2 as well. So that’s been down about 30 percent year over year. And if you look at the actual corporate segment of booking volume in airlines, that is down 15 percent Q1 year over year, and that trend continued into April.

There’s definitely some softening and some decrease in corporate travel. We think that a component of that is the uncertainty in economies and what the impact has been to airlines. You’ve probably seen quite a bit of businesses reducing travel spend and trying to feel things out, see how the economy’s going to perform, and in a B2B world, looking at how are our customers are performing. So there’s a little bit of caution … [and] that’s also compounded by some safety concerns as well from the airline industry lately.

In our survey data that we did from the traveling public, there’s some concerns around safety. Anything from what’s happening at Newark Airport [to] the past couple of years, some of the Boeing issues, some of the turbulence issues out there. So maybe some economic caution, with uncertainty playing a role in that, compounded by safety concerns. From a traveler perspective and business perspective, it’s a little bit of financial and personal well-being.

BTN: Do you have any data beyond March 31 at this point?

Harvey: We see the trends continuing into Q2.

BTN: This year has been very different year in terms of the marketplace and in terms of everything that’s happened. How much more difficult does that make t analyze and forecast, given the breaking news every day?

Harvey: It definitely makes it more challenging because, and I think of it very similar to what brands were dealing with in Covid, you don’t know what was happening next. Is there going to be another surge, another wave, and what does that do to the traveling public?

Travel in general has been pretty resilient over the last couple of years. This isn’t the first time that there’s been some economic uncertainty, but it is the first time that we’re seeing travel starting to get impacted by that. There was always this [sense of,] “I’m going to prioritize experiences and travel over things.” And now we’re starting to see, “Actually, maybe I’m pulling back in all of these areas.”

So with that volatility—maybe an executive directive comes out and then it’s pulled back the next day—it’s very hard to forecast for that and account for that. And so flexibility is going to be super important in thinking through different scenarios, forecasting multiple different scenarios if this stays in place, if it doesn’t stay in place.

It obviously increases the workload on your analytics team. You just have to anticipate that as much as you can get ahead of it.

BTN: If you go back to 2024, looking ahead at your outlook for 2025, how did Q1 fare?

Harvey: We won’t forecast necessarily for traffic and performance for the airlines. We leave that to our customers, but we do look of course at the trends, and that’s some of the benchmark data that we put out. So that 30 percent down year over year in Q1, it was interesting and a divergence from what we’ve been seeing previously, where performance was pretty steady year over year since 2020. You’ve been seeing that kind of resurgence and that healthy performance. It’s one of the first times that we’ve seen some more concerning indicators around potential pullbacks in travel spend from both leisure and corporate travelers.