Business travel management platform Tripism recently reported that activity levels
were 250 per cent higher than the organisation’s pre-Covid-19 peak. Tripism’s
CEO Adam Kerr spoke to BTN executive editor Michael B. Baker and
subsequently BTN Europe editor Andy Hoskins about the changes he is seeing to
travel management patterns, the company's priorities amid the recovery, and the key
challenges faced by travel buyers.
BTN Europe: Tell us how Tripism fits into the business travel
ecosystem.
Adam Kerr: We bring together a company’s travel information – its
suppliers, hotel programme, travel policy, visa information, travel advice – in
a single portal, and companies use Tripism to replace their travel intranet.
It’s like what Workday does for HR – we bring everything together in one place.
It links users to the right booking platforms or processes but we don’t want to
do the transaction. Suppliers can load deals and offers specific to that
company, while employees can access colleagues’ travel reviews and
recommendations.
BTNE: Are you seeing a high level of confidence from business
travellers right now?
Kerr: When planning a trip, a traveller will sometimes go straight
to a booking tool. But for a lot of people, they have to plan their trip, and
historically they've done that by adding and leveraging tools for leisure. They
go to Google or TripAdvisor to piece them together, and the last place they go
to is the booking tool to complete that transaction. We put everything in one
place. If you're planning a trip, we'll bring in all the information that you
as a traveller for a company needs to know: preferred hotel, city rate caps,
risks, International SOS information, the limousine service that you use, visa
information... It makes people have confidence in the information. It's highly
specific and personalised to you as an employee for that company. Sometimes we
find travellers using the Tripism platform have better access than the actual
agent does to things like benefits and accessing information in a single place.
There are some things we can't help with. For the foreseeable future, you need
to speak to an agent if something has gone wrong and you're stuck in Chicago,
for example, and there's no flights out.
BTNE: Are you seeing any changes in the sort of
information companies want to provide to their employees?
Kerr: The amount of information that needs to be communicated with
travellers is increasing all the time – risk, safety, sustainability – and that
rate of change is well beyond legacy tools. We’re seeing that the priority of
Covid-related information is sliding while wellbeing and sustainability are
moving up.
BTNE: What are the key challenges your clients are asking you to
solve at the moment?
Kerr: Some travellers have forgotten some of the basics about
travel, so there's an education about their travel programme and what travellers
need to remember when they're planning their trips. Companies have progressed
their travel programmes. They probably have new partnerships they want to
communicate, things like new car service companies, or they've brought
food-delivery companies on-board, and they want to communicate those to the
travellers.
At the same time, travel teams are dealing with some of the challenges
around car rental shortages and driver shortages with some of the
limousine services, and they need to manage that and really get engaged with
travellers, set expectations and provide alternate means of ground transport.
Then there's a lot of focus around sustainability, so some companies are
looking at increasing the visibility of rail services. On domestic short trips,
they'd rather you take the train than a flight, even if the cost is
slightly higher. And then some travel management companies have been struggling
with staff shortages, so the support that they get there can vary and provide
challenges.
With sustainability, there's a lot of work. Some companies are more advanced
than others. We're looking at different ways of doing that, in terms of
standardisation and terms – displaying it to travellers in a better way,
communicating it to travellers in a different way. We've started providing
information to travellers so they can make choices about sustainable properties
and different things they are able to do. One or two of our companies have
asked us to prioritise sustainable content first, and it works in two ways. It
means that travellers will see information firsthand [and] therefore [will be]
more likely to make a sustainable choice, but also it adds an increased
incentive to those suppliers who are now presented further down the page to up
their game and achieve whatever benchmarks that the customers expect in terms
of a sustainable partner.
BTNE: What developments do you have in the pipeline?
Kerr: We’re looking to introduce carbon footprint
information pretty soon. And something really interesting we’re looking at is
working with customers’ expense data to look at restaurant use. So employees
can see which restaurants are popular with their colleagues in a particular
location. We can show the top ten most popular ones for your company, for
example.
BTNE: How did your business hold up throughout the pandemic?
Kerr: We were fortunate during Covid. We've had 100 per cent
customer retention. Some of our companies were still doing some travel, so we
did some work around Covid safety and so on. Probably 18 months ago, we started
to see that people were getting ready for the return to travel and some of the
complexities around that, and our platform helps travel teams to communicate
that information, so we started to see an increase in new customers coming
through. In the last six to 12 months, we've seen a big uptick in new customers
and the activity from the users within those corporations, so it's exciting
times. We added around 20,000 new users – that’s individual members of staff at
our corporate customers – in April and May.
BTNE: Do you expect large companies will continue to be your
main focus going forward?
Kerr: We have looked at doing an SME product. That's something we
were looking at pre-Covid, and we might come back to it at some point. Today,
we focus just on those large enterprise customers.
BTNE: Have you seen priorities change in light of the pandemic?
Kerr: It's really evolving the role of the travel team. I'm
relatively new to travel, but a lot of travel team work historically seems to
be focused around procurement and having those contracts in place. There's been
a gradual shift, and with the pandemic, it's a tectonic shift. If you think of
the things the HR team would do because somebody was in the office, now that
there is the hybrid setup where people aren't in a company office, just a
meeting and event location … they have to create these spaces where people can
meet. The travel team has become responsible for that, making sure that's a
successful event, so it's not so much about heads on beds and bums on seats.
It's a much more human aspect to it now. We're interested to see where that travel
function lands – we wonder if there will be more of a shift of companies
bringing it into HR or people and experience. It's an exciting time for travel
teams.
BTNE: What does this mean in terms of how travel managers are
valued within their organisation?
Kerr: Travel teams do a really fantastic job, but the problem
they have had in the past is that people don't understand how great these
programmes are. I don't think the value travel teams have historically brought
is around that negotiation and contracting. I think there's a much bigger
impact. The evidence that shows the quality of your trip impacts the
effectiveness of that trip but also your productivity when you return from that
trip. We know that some of the banks we work with, they benchmark their travel
programme against other banks, because it's super important in terms of
retention and recruitment. The value that the travel team is bringing in those
aspects is far greater than the dollar savings through the procurement process.