The Business Travel Magazine Feb/Mar 2019

Travel tech / TMCs
This level of personalisation chimes with
the consumerisation of business travel. It
may not yet have reached the stellar levels
provided by Amazon but TMCs’ technology
combined with that of suppliers ensures
traveller can feel recognised as an individual.
Traditionally, OBTs were functional while
retail tools put user experience first, which
made travellers less willing to use the
corporate option. Now, however, corporate
technology is changing the way it looks and
feels, and in addition, “We have brought in
some of the suppliers that people use outside
work, such as booking.com,” says Burroughes.
“Keeping track of the numerous new leisure
providers is difficult. We support open
booking, which allows people to book outside
the traditional TMC environment and means
we can pull data back in,” he says.
Zeno by ATPI is another personalised tool.
“It was developed to look like a consumer site
to engage travellers,” says Group Head of
E-commerce, Jenny Thornton. “It provides
itinerary recommendations and uses AI to
enhance the booking experience by recalling
preferences such as favourite departure
airport, hotels and even
streamlines loyalty
programmes.”
Bright young things
Newcomers are only viewed as disruptors if
they are doing something you are not, and on
that basis TMCs are now partnering with
start-ups to benefit from their free thinking
and creativity. FCM has integrated AI chatbot
Claire from booking platform 30 Seconds to
Fly into its chatbot SAM, so that travellers can
chat and book flights.
FCM is also running pilots in a number of
markets. “Rather than develop a large-scale
programme to look at all the ways we interact
with travellers in a vacuum, we are
attempting different approaches in a number
of markets; like gamification to drive
behaviour and multi-channel approval flows,”
says Rouse. “We are testing what we think will
be popular in those markets and we are
backing up those tests with research.”
Advantage has partnered with language app
Whym, which connects members’ clients with
a human interpreter in seconds; and Win
Hotel Hub pulls together 1.5 million hotels,
allowing members to offer clients the best
rates with attendant reporting.
BTD claims to have been first to market in
Europe with hotel benchmarking provider
TRIPBAM, which analyses hotel bookings in
the TMC’s system, and if any of the rates for
those bookings decrease before travel it
automatically rebooks. The tool has been
widely deployed by corporates and some
TMCs have mimicked the concept with their
own technology. TRIPBAM claims to achieve
savings of 32.5% on average and has
recently introduced Strategic Shift
Share (S3) to help travel managers
identify opportunities to move
share to its preferred hotels.
BTD also uses automated
TMCs are now
partnering with
start-ups to benefit from
their free thinking,
innovation and creativity”
rail delay repay system RAILGUARD.
Meanwhile, CWT works with accelerator Plug
and Play in Silicon Valley, which connects
organisations to the world’s start-ups.
However, all this activity raises a major
problem for TMCs: how to integrate modern
technology into legacy systems, a headache
that would once have been fixed with Band
Aid and prayers. No longer, however, and this
is partly thanks to the increasingly widespread
use of open technology such as APIs, which
make businesses less reliant on GDS, allowing
them to build their own platform and choose
with whom they plug and play.
Legacy tech providers are also girding up for
the 2020s. “We are working with Amadeus to
make a more open platform. GDS used to be
about locking people into their system and
they are now looking at being more open and
allowing you to integrate, giving access to
their technology and content,” says Rouse.
BTD’s in-house development team designs
proprietary technology, providing easier
integration with modern systems through an
open-sourced booking system; and ATPI’s
TravelHub dashboard is built with an open
API platform, too.
The final word goes to Advantage’s Nicol:
“The fourth industrial revolution is digital and
APIs are at the heart of that; it is an API
economy and anyone not working with an
open platform could be left behind.”
72 THEBUSINESSTRAVELMAG.COM