Accountancy and consulting giant EY is to expand its experimental project providing a blockchain-based portal for employees to book leisure trips.
EY started the pilot six months ago for US employees to book flights for leisure and is now looking to expand it to staff globally, as well as adding a hotel component.
Ian Spearing, EY’s global innovation and technology leader, said the blockchain project showed there was a “clear case” that such a set-up could be used in a larger corporate booking environment.
Spearing added the idea of using blockchain for bookings started three years ago, spurred by a desire to access personalised content as promised by the New Distribution Capability (NDC) standard being used to sell flights and ancillaries.
The major pain point was the need to align an online booking tool, global distribution system (GDS), travel management company and airlines to access the content, which was not feasible for EY’s teams on a large scale.
Spearing added: “If you have all those in place, you could receive some NDC content, but our programme didn't allow us to do that because we have more than 100 markets where we have a travel programme with multiple technology vendors and multiple agencies.”
EY has been working with blockchain specialist Winding Tree and two large US carriers, which have not been named, on the new platform.
“We are trying to offer more to our employees around talent retention and attraction, so we took it upon ourselves to see how we could purpose this technology in the leisure space and bring something different to employees,” said Spearing.
The portal launched in March in the US and has now facilitated about 1,000 leisure bookings for employees. It is hosted on EY's internal SharePoint page for travel, meetings and events, with employees receiving notification of the offering via direct messages with a link.
“The parameters we sent to the suppliers was that this was something you could use to build a unique proposition for you as a traveller, something you would not be able to construct on the dot-com site,” said Spearing.
“We wanted to really test how someone can build a combination of discounts and benefits that can be packaged together, depending on the types of routes they would select, that is not fully constructed in the current GDS.”
Spearing said that feedback from employees has been "great," with many staff praising the innovation of the portal.
He added the initial success of the platform means it will be expanded to employees outside the US who can use it to book inbound flights to the US.
In the coming weeks, the teams will also be adding a hotel component to the portal, particularly focusing on employees who need long hotel stays for project purposes.
EY has a lot of client-facing teams who visit the same city multiple times for stays of several weeks' duration, and those employees tend to need amenities not offered within usual corporate booking portals: such as dry cleaning and gym access.
In addition, while such stays are usually booked initially via a TMC or GDS, employees often end up extending their stay directly with the hotel, which can lead to a loss of “visibility” about where people are travelling.
“We also can offer personalised and tailored rates for people staying in hotels for long periods of time,” added Spearing.
The EY teams have built a new user interface for hotels and are working with two large hotel companies to provide offers with project rates. They are also looking into offering consumer leisure content for these hotels. The hotel project will be available globally upon launch.
Even as it expands the availability to book flights for leisure, the teams have no plans currently to bring the blockchain project to the corporate side of bookings.
“There's an absolute need for TMCs, booking tools and GDSs for programmes of our size,” explained Spearing. “This was just a technology exploration and we always focused on the leisure area first.
“We've identified and proved that there is supply chain efficiency and visibility improvements by connecting directly in the leisure space. As a corporate buyer, you can personalise content and fare bundles that might not be available in the current ecosystem today.”