Stefan Cars is founder and CEO of travel tech company Snowfall

When the future of PSNGR1 was thrown into doubt more than a year ago, fellow travel tech company Snowfall moved quickly to acquire the widely praised online booking tool.

Speaking in August 2022, Stefan Cars, the founder and CEO of UK-based Snowfall, told BTN Europe that “the final pieces are being put into place” to rescue the company. After that, silence, until eight months later when in May this year Snowfall announced the launch of Junction One, a booking tool built on the backbone of PSNGR1.

While Snowfall had already been working on the development of its own booking technology before the opportunity came along, the acquisition of PSNGR1 accelerated its launch of a tool by a year, estimates Cars.

“We met PSNGR1 a couple of years ago and we really liked what they were doing,” he says. “We had some conversations about whether we should do some partnerships. It was sad what happened to them but for us it was a great opportunity to level up very quickly.”

Cars continues: “We had already built some IP for a couple of customers but it wasn’t as advanced [in development] as PSNGR1. We probably would have had our own tool out by the end of this year so we gained a year of time to market and were able to move resources into continuing to develop what is now Junction One.”

Users can expect “all the normal stuff” expected of an online booking tool, says Cars, including “search sorting, CO2 budgeting filters, approvals, negotiated corporate rates, policy and informed decision-making… in fact we’ve gone beyond Serko and [Amadeus] Cytric in that regard.”

What makes it different, however, is access to additional content such as ‘first and last mile’ travel providers and ‘experiences’ such as events, theatre tickets and restaurant bookings, plus Tripboards, a feature that allows colleagues to visualise, share and “collaboratively plan and manage their trips and to duplicate itineraries.”

Partnerships signed between PSNGR1 and a number of TMCs – including Gray Dawes, Blue Cube, Take Two and the Focus Travel Partnership – were extended under Snowfall’s ownership and were followed in June by its first TMC deals in Australia.

“We’ve had a few people working that market hard and it’s been clear how stale the Australian market is in terms of distribution and booking tools,” says Cars. “We’ll make some tweaks to the tool that might be needed in that market. But we really see big growth globally given the lack of competition in this space.”

The United States, where PSNGR1 was developed, and Asia are also key target markets, in particular Korea and Singapore, where Snowfall's strategy is to sign mid-market TMCs – “the sweetspot where they can move at the speed they want” – and re-seller partnerships, all on a transaction fee-based commercial model.

Moving in on GDS' territory

Some TMCs will also choose to take Junction Go, Snowfall’s distribution marketplace which Cars hopes will supplant legacy global distribution systems. “There is a hybrid model where TMCs have existing contracts with GDSs so they source [content] from them and then Junction One functions very well on top and takes the additional content we have – bed banks, ferry, train, first and last mile, experiences – from Junction Go.”

He continues: “Many [TMCs] have existing GDS contracts and relationships which we don’t want to disrupt. Our hope is that over time they will be contracting with Snowfall from a full Junction perspective. This is a slow moving market. It’s not something that’s going to happen in weeks or months. We can provide all the content, with better technology at a lower cost-base. For some TMCs it will be a longer transition than others but over time we’d like to see them exiting their existing GDS contracts.”

The proliferation of NDC content is something that Cars believes will accelerate TMCs’ transition out of the EDIFACT environment. “Qantas, for example, is aggressively pursuing NDC and a lot of agencies we talk to want access to their lowest fares,” he notes.

Cars says that the surcharges being introduced by many airlines for fares distributed through the GDS are “actually good [for us] because of the reluctance [of TMCs] to move and work in modern ways. The level of the fee structure is so high… I’m not saying they are being forced… but they’re going to have to move on. Regardless of us being in the market, this change is going to happen which means changing the way you’re working. People will need to move into NDC and that’s where our hybrid model works very well.”

Nevertheless, Snowfall's distribution marketplace pulls content from a range of sources, including legacy GDSs, because “some players still only have an EDIFACT strategy and don’t have NDC or, for that matter, any API strategy at all”. The “backfilling” with this “sticky” content is minimal, says Cars. “We have to get that content from somewhere.”

NDC content front and centre

He describes Junction Go’s NDC content as comprehensive and its sourcing of such fares as agnostic. Are there any significant gaps? “No. We have access to all the NDC content we need,” he says, noting that includes American Airlines. The company is sourcing some NDC fares directly from airlines and others from “numerous aggregators”, and it is adding “a few carriers every month”, adds Cars.

Junction One customers can choose to flag search results as GDS or NDC fares but “from an end user perspective it doesn’t really matter to them where it comes from. On the backside they do [have visibility] because it’s needed for reporting.” Typically, fares will be “unified and presented agnostically to the customer as it should be.”

One of the biggest issues with NDC fares has proved to be the ability to manage and service them post-booking. How does Snowfall address that? “A TMC can pick it up manually but we have also created toolsets that should help automate some of these things even if some of these airlines do not fully support some of the servicing elements yet. We’ve created toolsets to help do that in an automated or semi-automated way. We also have our own travel fulfilment team to support TMCs in this transition that can manually help them process and fix these things if need be.”

Cars considers Snowfall's tech suite more or less complete with the addition of a booking tool, but he says the company will continue pushing boundaries. “From a functionality point of view we are there now, but we will continue adding more content, better ways of transacting it, adding more modalities. We’re also doing more things with Junction Plus [Snowfall's automated traveller assistance module] to make sure the post-booking experience is as good as it can be,” says Cars.

In the meantime, he has more to say on the future of the legacy GDSs he hopes Snowfall will eventually supplant as NDC and multimodal trips come to the fore. “The GDSs were ahead of the curve when they were invented but we are talking about old technology now. I think what they are doing, being marketplaces connecting supply with demand, that will continue to exist, but the legacy GDS will go away because of the sheer costs involved and bad tech that exists there.”

He continues: “Multimodal travel is growing very quickly in certain markets and is going to go global as well. The legacy GDS doesn’t have the support for a lot of that – ferry, rail, buses, first and last mile – and you will need the ability to make one transaction for the full journey. 

“We want to be the new API-driven marketplace that connects all that [diverse] supply and demand. We have the technology and we will continue growing that. I’m not saying the existing players won’t create new toolsets to compete in this area, but we also know big companies can have a tougher job innovating with the slow time to market. There’s going to be a bunch of new players – we are just one of them looking to change the plumbing into a modern way of operating.”