TripActions has launched Enterprise Edition, an enhanced
travel management solution that enables it to compete for the likes of Fortune
500 and FTSE 250 organisations, the company announced.
Two years in development, the product has been accelerated
by the coronavirus pandemic, during which time it said it has eliminated “any
lingering questions about being able to service the needs of global clients”.
Targeting organisations with annual travel spend of more
than £15 million, the company said the new product “gives enterprise leaders a
comprehensive, unified T&E solution” combining booking experience, global inventory,
agent support and payment and expense technology.
Daniel Finkel, TripActions’ chief travel officer, said Enterprise Edition “takes the core TripActions platform and layers on top
what’s needed for larger enterprise companies”. This includes more complex
travel policy rules and approvals systems, as well as re-shopping tools,
traveller tracking and consulting services such as programme and policy design
and optimisation.
“We’ve spent a lot of time in the past year building the
infrastructure required to support the needs of large global multinational
organisations so we can support employees wherever they are and wherever
they’re going,” said Finkel.
While TripActions’ tech-led model has sometimes been eyed
with caution by those with more complex travel needs or requiring significant
offline support, the pandemic has demonstrated it can meet those needs, said Finkel.
“We’ve had a lot of conversations recently with larger organisations.
They knew we had the tech and the ability to meet a lot of their needs from the
platform perspective, but some had this lingering question about whether we
could truly support their global employees. A lot of their existing partners
couldn’t do it [during the pandemic] but we could for our customers.”
The organisation has made significant investments in
self-service capabilities, enabling users to amend and cancel hotels, flights
and whole trips online in real-time, helping reduce demand for offline support.
It has also automated the management and application of unused tickets since
the Covid-19 outbreak.
“We have enabled travel managers to upload all trips and to
cancel or change them en masse. We developed that right at the start of Covid
and that’s not something that was in the marketplace before.”
Finkel added: “We’ve also invested a tremendous amount in the agents themselves
and the tools and services that enable them to be really good at their job.”
In normal circumstances TripActions promises a one-minute
response on calls; during the pandemic it rose to six minutes. “Clients of some
TMCs were hanging on the phones for hours,” said Finkel.
The company has won 400 clients in recent months and among
its 4,000 customers it now counts around 200 enterprise-level organisations. They
include multinational engineering organisation AECOM and construction company
Lennar.
“Over the last five years we’ve been working with growing
organisations that increasingly need more and more enterprise-level solutions,
but we also have this tide of Fortune 500 companies moving over to TripActions
and requiring really robust enterprise-grade solutions. This is our flag in the
ground that we are enterprise-ready,” said Finkel.
Chief marketing officer Meagen Eisenberg added: “We started
out in commercial mid-market and we’ve had travel managers move into larger
companies and pull us into that. You get that momentum and Covid has
accelerated it. There is no better time than now,
when travel is down, to switch platforms.”
Eisenberg said TripActions’ flat fee remains US$25 per trip, which incorporates all elements – flight, train, car hire and hotel – and
there’s no charge for engaging agents offline. Customers with larger volumes
might be entitled to discounted fees and could have specific support agents
appointed to them.
Two years ago, the organisation was regularly competing with
TravelPerk, TravelBank and Egencia, added Eisenberg, “but now we’re going up
against Amex GBT, BCD, CWT… some large players. This is a good time to take
market share.”
The company said that although bookings remain
“way down”, it is now seeing “strong momentum and substantial week-after-week
growth”.