"We've studied the small and midsize market for a number of years," said Traxo CEO Andres Fabris. "We've interviewed dozens of travel managers to understand, specifically, what they really need, and it's two things: the need to know where their travelers are for safety and security reasons and they want to save money."
While that sounds obvious, he said, the crowd of new entrants and established players tweaking their booking engines, user interfaces and service packages for small and midsize enterprises may not be matching their needs. In fact, it might be oversolving for a segment where consumer travel tools are working just fine. Fine, that is, except there's no data.
Traxo Connect for SME steps into that data gap. Traxo, as a solution for larger clients, has billed itself as an off-channel data aggregator that can work as a net to bring noncompliant bookings back into managed travel visibility. For the midmarket, the pitch is simpler. There's no off-channel, just data aggregation.
Traxo's SME bundle offers four components: data capture, data visibility, duty of care and savings. Traxo Filter integrates with enterprise email servers to capture and parse travel itineraries as they come inside corporate walls, no matter the source; Traxo funnels that data into a dashboard that will allow SMEs to visualize travel booking activity and spend, both prior to and after travel takes place. It also parses from itineraries real-time data pertinent to duty of care and offers a limited duty of care capability in terms of traveler whereabouts. "This could be enough for smaller SMEs," said Fabris, but he acknowledged many would need a more robust solution supported by Traxo's data. Traxo has partnered with price assurance provider Tripbam to track hotel market pricing and rebook best available rates. An Airhelp partnership scours a client's booked air data and matches with flight disruption data to determine disruption compensation eligibility and automatically process claims.
It all happens in the background as travelers use consumer tools to book and execute trips—no behavior change in the mix.
"Rather than trying to create an ecosystem that requires behavior change and compliance, we approach it from a different perspective," said Fabris. "Even in highly managed programs, employees book hotels outside the preferred channels half the time." He pointed to increased content fragmentation as the primary culprit and noted that New Distribution Capability, direct connects and overall consumerization will continue that trend. "Folks have tried to change behavior for a decade, but they haven't succeeded. Why introduce that to the midmarket? Our argument is that you can't engineer your way out of it from a product perspective."