Traxo has today announced deals with the UK’s Advantage Travel
Partnership and WIN Global Travel Network to allow the consortia
to offer their clients a tool which tracks programme leakage and gives greater
visibility on their travellers' movements in times of crisis.
Traxo for TMCs will enable the corporations
to share all of their traveller’s booking data with their TMCs in real time, including
for bookings that are made outside the TMC channel. The deals with Advantage and WIN - European firsts for the technology company - were announced at today’s virtual BTN Global Travel Risk Summit Europe.
Traxo CEO Andres Fabris said that when the Covid pandemic lockdowns
started, many corporate travel managers and TMCs realised they had serious gaps
in their business travel data.
"Despite company policy, employees inevitably had booked
their travel 'out-of-policy' or 'off-channel,' and therefore, that booking data
was invisible during this critical time. As a result, companies had no idea if their employees were stuck in a
country that had just closed its borders or had recently returned from a virus
'hot spot,' and needed to be quarantined.
Basically, all the missing travel bookings created a last-minute duty of
care crisis,” he said.
Advantage Travel Partnership CEO Julia
Lo Bue-Said added, “Duty
of care is higher than ever on travel managers’ agendas, and therefore it's
absolutely invaluable for TMCs to be aware of their clients’ employees’ travel
itineraries in real time, regardless of whether they were booked by the TMC or
not.”
The idea of using technology to capture bookings that have been
made by travellers outside policy is not new - KDS Maverick, SAP Concur’s
Triplink and the browser plug-in Shep have been around for some time.
Unlike these other tools, Traxo for TMCs is installed onto a
corporate’s mail server. When a traveller makes a booking on a supplier website
or through an aggregator, the corporate receives a copy of confirmation emails that
are issued. This means travellers do not need to forward these emails
manually or connect the tool to their loyalty programmes; the Traxo system
recognises confirmation emails from thousands of suppliers.
“Our system works because no action is required by the traveller.
It captures all of the bookings as they are occurring,” said Fabris.
The non-TMC data is folded together with bookings through the TMC
and the combined booking and spend data is instantly available to the
corporate's TMC via online reporting tools and API integration. The TMC can
then consolidate that additional data into their own applications, analytics,
reporting and support services as desired.
Sonia
Michaels, corporate relationship manager at Advantage, said the deal has been
put together with its TMC strategy group, which includes Click Travel,
Gray Dawes, Blue Cube, Fello and TAG.
“We have been concentrating our efforts so that our members have
everything they need to meet the changing demands of travel management,” she said.
“Duty of care has always been high on the agenda but what happened
in the pandemic is that it highlighted a gap. Leakage has always been a big
issue and what Traxo does is allow the company and the TMC to have formal visibility
to let them manage the travel programme fully.”
“From our members’ point of view, it allows them to evolve the TMC
proposition. Corporates are going to need and want a full end-to-end service from
the TMC.”
The idea of capturing booking data invisibly might raise eyebrows
over privacy.
“From the very beginning,
the safety and security of the data has been paramount. Traxo for TMCs is GDPR
compliant,” confirmed Fabris.
“We have worked with Europe-based privacy lawyers to help
companies understand how they balance employee safety and privacy. It turns out
that within GDPR there are acceptable uses when the employee’s safety is at risk.
It is very clear that in those situations, the company must err on the side of
employee safety.”
“We have also set up a European data centre in case our European
clients want all of the data to be processed in the EU,” he said.
As well as the duty of care angle, Fabris said the tool would also
allow travel managers to get better visibility of spend and use the data to negotiate
using the data for volume that was previously considered to be direct consumer traffic
but is actually rogue corporate spend.
The tool will also allow corporates to take action if the available
rates fall after a traveller has made their booking. If a corporate is monitoring
market rates using reshopping technology, such as TripBAM, they can go back to
the traveller to suggest rebooking at the lower rate.
Traxo for TMCs works on a hybrid subscription model with three
levels of monthly fee that include a set number of transactions with an overage
charge if the number of transactions exceeds that limit.
In this year's Leading 50 TMCs
ranking, Advantage, which has more than 200 TMC members, said it managed £3.5
billion in business travel spend for its members. WIN has around 6,000 TMC
member locations in 75 countries. Advantage
and WIN managed a total annual travel spend of more than US$15 billion in 2019.