Corporate travel reshopping platform TripBam plans to add new hotel request-for-proposals capabilities to its Smart Sourcing tool next year, including an automated dynamic discount renewal button, the company announced this week at the Global Business Travel Association and VDR Europe conference in Germany.
Now a division of Emburse, TripBam's newest hotel sourcing update includes three key elements, the first of which is an automated dynamic rate renewal button. This capability allows buyers to automatically renew discounts and eliminates the "need for buyers to go back to hotel partners to extend a dynamic discount for the following year," the company said.
Also included in the update are two new dashboards, including a project tracker and an office geolocation service.
The project tracker dashboard provides insight into negotiated rates and discounts with properties in a "specific area for a set time period," according to TripBam, allowing users to better source and track project-based travel spending, the company said.
TripBam's office geolocation dashboard allows users to source corporate rates at hotels near new office locations. With this dashboard, buyers provide TripBam with "geographic coordinates" of their offices and then "receive a streamlined report detailing nearby properties already within their programme and properties where they should source a new corporate discount," according to TripBam.
Product updates are currently in pilot with "select customers" and will be available to all Smart Sourcing customers at no additional cost by the end of the first quarter of 2024, a TripBam representative told BTN.
The news follows TripBam's latest hotel RFP enhancement, announced in May, and its collaborative effort with Emburse, announced in October. In its most recent Market Snapshot Report, the company said buyers will need to negotiate hard for 2024 hotel and air deals.