Conichi Captures 2016 Innovator Award

Conichi calls itself The Hotel App, and it snatched the win from 12 corporate travel industry technology innovators—including the likes of Avis, Groupize and Uber for Business—who gathered in New York City this week at The BTN Group’s 2016 Innovate Conference. Judges Eric Bailey, global travel and group venue lead for Microsoft; Cathy Sharpe, corporate travel manager for ITW; Norm Rose, president of Travel Tech Consulting; and last year’s winner of the Business Travel Innovator Award, Jeroen van Velzen, CEO and co-founder of Roadmap critiqued the competing technologies.

Conichi is an agnostic layer of technology that integrates with hotel property management systems, point-of-sale systems and loyalty programs and also provides hotels with beacon technology to recognize travelers from their mobile devices. Once locked in, Conichi displays customer details and preferences to hotel staff to facilitate service, extend special offers or messaging to the traveler. For the traveler, the technology facilitates pre-arrival communication about personal preferences. Onsite, it eliminates standard travel processes with mobile check-in, keyless entry and mobile check-out. It also facilitates virtual card payment, which has been a pain point for travel managers. Conichi’s website claims the app currently has 23 million users. The technology has not yet launched in the United States.

Conichi founder and CEO Maximilian Waldmann said, “We are ready to roll out in the United States, and we are in conversation with several clients. Winning this recognition puts us in an even better position.”

Waldmann pitched the corporate travel community with Conichi’s ability to deploy to hotels within the corporation’s managed hotel program to enhance the traveler experience. The German company has an established partnership with hotel distribution provider HRS, which currently flags the “smart hotels” within its portfolio and prioritizes them in search results.

Freebird Named People’s Choice
Innovate conference attendees voted for a separate People's Choice award winner: Freebird, a carrier-agnostic mobile flight rebooking app that automatically kicks in during a flight disruption to search multiple data sources to determine the best alternatives to the original flight. The app returns results to the mobile device along with click-to-book functionality. Re-bookings are free after a minimal per-segment fee paid when registering the flight for the service. Because users are accessing a new ticket, the original ticket remains untouched for the corporation to reclaim the value through usual channels.

The BTN Group’s 2016 Innovate Conference concluded yesterday. Additional Innovator Award competitors included Avis Budget Group, Bizly, Blacklane, Cvent, Dufl, Groupize, HRS, Lyft, Trip Rebel and Uber for Business.