Ground transport mobility platform Jyrney was crowned 2022 Business Travel Innovation Faceoff champion at Business Travel Show Europe in June.
The judging panel – which included Microsoft travel technology manager Steve Clagg, Service Now EMEA regional travel manager Carine Morin, EY innovation and technology leader Ian Spearing and Jack Dow, CEO of Grapevine and the winner of last year's Faceoff – rated Jyrney the most impressive among nine competing companies at the event.
Jyrney co-founder and CEO, Daniel Price, who delivered the winning pitch at the event, spoke to BTN Europe immediately after his triumph for a BTN TV interview and again a week later.
BTN Europe: How does it feel to win the 2022 Innovation Faceoff competition amid a strong field of nine companies and to impress a revered panel of judges?
Daniel Price: I’m still a bit in shock. I’m obviously massively pleased to have won the award and to achieve what we have. We were up against a very, very good group of competitors so to have won against them… it was great to do that. Our team worked incredibly hard over the last two years to deliver a game-changing platform; it was amazing to share this experience with them and for their achievements to be recognised by the industry.
BTNE: Explain the premise of Jyrney.
Price: Ground transport is really fragmented. You have lots of players – taxis drivers, taxi operators, dispatch companies, ride hail companies – and what Jyrney does is take all that technology and simplifies it into a single API so travel technology platforms can have one point of contact and one integration, and make it really easy for the TMC to get access to that content. I personally believe it’s that fragmented nature that means ground transport has never previously had its place within travel and hasn’t been adopted as much as other modes of transport.
BTNE: Why did you decide to tackle this?
Price: I’ve been involved in ground transport for all my career. I started in car hire and worked for a couple of car rental companies, I worked in the aggregation of car hire, I also did aggregation of taxis and took my previous company into business travel and really saw the opportunity there. I’ve got a real understanding of both sides of the market and if I can be that bit in the middle that glues these two markets together – the operators and the TMCs – that don’t really talk to each other right now, then that is success and we’ll have achieved what we wanted to.
BTNE: What about the timing?
Price: When we started building Jyrney we knew it was the right time and the right opportunity to deliver this technology into the market. Starting to build a global travel platform two weeks before global travel completely stopped [because of the Covid-19 pandemic] might not seem like the best timing but actually it gave us the time to focus on the product solution. Business travel was always going to come back – it was just a case of when – and we can see now the demand is huge and it’s growing for ground transport.
BTNE: What did the judges like about Jyrney?
Price: I think what really stood out was that they liked the idea of improving the experience for the passenger. Ground transport doesn’t normally get this kind of attention because it’s really hard to manage. What Jyrney does is follow that booking from start to finish and gives us status alerts on whether the booking is actually running on time. We can then intervene to reallocate or change the booking and help the passenger have a better experience.
BTNE: What kind of scope, scale and content are you working with currently?
Price: Currently we’re looking at standard taxis, we’re looking at chauffeur vehicles, executive transfers… and we’re looking at very strong UK coverage and we’re looking at global coverage with the connections we have. In the future we will move into other modes of transport like car hire, coaches, car share, micromobility, autonomous vehicles… who knows what else. The technology is built to handle any kind of transport.
BTNE: The TMC market is your primary target. Will that broaden?
Price: At the moment we’re looking at the TMC market because there is a complete gap there. No one has built a tech platform like this that manages and automates ground transport for TMCs. That’s our real focus at the moment. When you’re a start-up, anyone advising you will tell you to have a laser focus on a market so that’s what we’re focusing on right now, but the future will bring what it brings.
BTNE: What has the response been like in the ensuing days since winning the award?
Price: We entered the competition to increase our exposure to the market and it’s certainly done that. We’ve had approaches from every corner of the globe. We’ve had so many enquiries – it’s really been a great platform for us. We’re still surprised we won, though, because ground transport never wins anything! It’s the last type of travel on anyone’s minds – it’s air then hotel and then even rail is higher. You have to go some way before you find someone who finds ground transport as exciting as I do!
BTNE: You’ve signed a couple of new contracts recently – how are they bedding down?
Price: Yes, we signed a contract with Sixt some months ago and have started integrating but we only announced that at the start of July. The deal will give Sixt customers access to taxi and minicab operators in ten launch locations in the UK. And then back in May we launched a deal with the Advantage Travel Partnership to provide on-demand and pre-bookable private hire, taxi and chauffeur-drive options to its TMC members and their customers via its Mobility Hub. On top of that, we’re starting to win TMC contracts and now have three or four in place. We’re also close to signing with a top ten TMC in the UK. There’s lots more we can’t talk about right now, but what I can say is that I’ve never had a pipeline like this before in my whole career. Mobility is becoming so important now.
BTNE: What’s the measure of success for you?
Price: The number of bookings being processed is the key measure. As a start-up it’s bookings that prove the market fit is right and that’s crucial. Revenue is obviously also important but initially it’s all about the use case and proving the tech works and there’s a need for it.
BTNE: What’s next for yourself and Jyrney?
Price: We’ve recently had confirmation that we’ll be taking part at Innovate [a BTN Group event in New York this October] where we’d love to make it a hat-trick for UK companies in the Faceoff competition there [following Grapevine’s triumph in 2021 and Thrust Carbon in 2020]. And I’m looking forward to returning to Innovation Faceoff as a judge at the event at next year’s Business Travel Show Europe. In the meantime, we’re in the middle of a funding round at the moment, we have a lot of new business enquiries, and things are looking very promising.