TempoTrip
Headquarters: Mt. Prospect, Ill.
CEO: Maurita Baker
Maurita Baker
Years after its birth as a booking module within Options Travel's tech stack, group and meeting air specialist TempoTrip now operates with a new partnership with meetings tech giant Cvent in hand.
TempoTrip specializes in group and meeting air travel logistics, a niche process that CEO Maurita Baker said remains quite manual.
"There's just so many challenges with group travel and anything where you have the logistics of multiple people traveling," Baker told BTN last month at the Global Business Travel Association convention in Chicago. "Meetings, events, incentive travel, sports travel, crew movement, project travel, team travel—it's extremely manual in the absence of any kind of a platform and tools. And so that is very costly."
Options Travel, the travel management company that this summer was acquired by Engine, in 2018 built a process to manage group air travel after being unable to find an acceptable solution on the market. "They had incredible success and had been able to grow the business without having to add resources," Baker said. "And because they were so successful with it, they realized, wait, we have something here."
Options spun off what became TempoTrip, which was included in the Engine deal, in February 2025, bringing in Baker as president and CEO. Baker is an industry veteran who had spent two decades with Travelport, including a stint as VP of sales for the Americas.
As a standalone company, TempoTrip provides meeting air booking functionality to meetings management companies and TMCs, including Options and others like Cain Travel and Christopherson Travel.
Meetings travel, according to Baker, is a process rife with exceptions that make it difficult to handle with standard transient booking tools.
"What [meeting organizers] are doing today largely is so manual it would blow your mind," she said. "They have spreadsheets of who all of those travelers are, and they are color-coding them: 'I have contacted this person, they haven't answered, this person I've contacted three times.' ... It's so time-consuming, and there's so much room for error, and it's costly."
After all, she said, not all meeting attendees are company employees with existing profiles, and incentive travelers in particular sometimes bring their spouses and children. Each event may have specific arrival and departure parameters. And there may be thousands of attendees.
To help solve that, TempoTrip has developed what Baker called a policy engine to offer for booking only flights that meet the specific parameters of the event.
"There's virtually no scenario that we cannot account for," she said. "Our policy engine is extremely sophisticated right down to the [arrival] time in the airport. Say there's an evening reception at 6 p.m.: We can have a policy that says nobody can catch a flight later than 3 p.m.
"We can really control the narrative for the traveler, yet the traveler's still making their own reservation, having that experience to choose what they want," she continued.
TempoTrip in July announced it had partnered with Cvent to allow attendee information to flow between the two platforms, so that attendees can book air through TempoTrip directly after registering through Cvent, information that then flows back into the attendee's Cvent profile for the event. That integration now takes the form of a dedicated URL developed for each attendee, Baker said, but she plans by year-end to connect via API.
TempoTrip accesses airline inventory through client TMCs' global distribution system connections. "We use their city code and their GDS connection," Baker said. "If they have airline programs, we can append that so that the discounts flow through. If the corporations have their own discounts, then we append that too."
The company charges a flat transaction fee per booking, the amount of which is determined by volume, as well as a one-time implementation fee. TempoTrip does not sell directly to corporate buyers, only TMCs.
Which prompts the question: If Options Travel was able to create TempoTrip's functionality, what's stopping another TMC from doing the same thing?
"The only thing that would be stopping them is their prioritization about what they want to invest in," Baker said. "All of these TMCs have a roadmap of what they want to do, and it just seems like this sector is never the priority. ... It's not easy, though. It's not an easy nut to crack. And that's, I think, another reason why you don't see a lot playing in this space."