Wenrix
- CEO: Amir Balaish
- Headquarters: Tel Aviv
- Last Funding Round: 2023
- Lead Investors: VC Insight Partners, Net Capital, Moshe
Rafiah
Wenrix co-founder & CEO Amir Balaish
Wenrix might not yet be a household name among corporate
travel buyers, but the technology company for the past several years has been
partnering with travel management companies to optimize their bookings and
efficiency and is pursuing a "very aggressive growth path" as its
offerings expand, co-founder and CEO Amir Balaish said.
Launched about eight years ago, Tel Aviv-based Wenrix's core
product has been its predictive price assurance technology, using AI to predict
how prices will change to ensure travelers get the best possible airfares and
hotel rates for their trip. That includes both pre-ticket
optimization—predicting when tickets will reach their lower price and
automating the booking and ticketing process at the optimal time—and
post-ticket optimization.
Wenrix's first major customer was
CWT, meaning it got its start on the business travel side, Balaish said.
Online travel agencies also are a major customer source for Wenrix—it currently
works with 12 of the 15 largest OTAs—and today, business travel comprises about
30 percent of its total business, he said. Via its TMC partners, which also
include World Travel Inc., the technology currently helps support about 1,000
corporate programs, including "a few dozen from Fortune 500
companies."
In developing the predictive price assurance technology,
Wenrix sought to "automate the process end to end," including the
refund window and the approval process, and it has achieved an automation rate
of about 98 percent, according to Balaish. For TMCs, it generates a revenue
uplift of 2.5 percent to 3 percent of total air spending, he said.
Wenrix also has brought its price assurance technology into
the search process. If a traveler has an airfare option, for example, that at
the time of search was priced about what was acceptable to a traveler's policy,
but there is a high probability that flight later will be a lower price that is
within policy, they would be able to book it with that lower price guaranteed
by Wenrix.
"Suddenly, it brings into the TMC and corporate an
opportunity to create their own version of fares, almost like private fares
they were not able to book," Balaish said. "Now, that information in
the search makes it available, which improves the corporate servicing."
In recent years, Wenrix has expanded its predictive price
assurance to include New Distribution Capability channels, to ensure travelers
are finding the lowest price in the variety of available channels, particularly
as continuous
pricing by airlines has increased the need for price assurance technology.
Automation of price assurance in NDC channels has been a
challenge, with variations by channel and by airline depending on their
maturity with NDC, Balaish said. Even so, automation rates among NDC channels
have been improving as well, with the void and approval process "fully
automated" and the refund window automated to about 75 percent, based on a
volume of $1 billion in NDC bookings—largely from OTAs, which were the early
adopters, he said.
With its visibility across corporate negotiated fares, TMC
fares, NDC fares and public fares, Wenrix also is able to provide data to
corporations around their program—whether they are getting their negotiated
fares or hotel rates, for example, or whether they could be negotiating better
pricing. "We can show them a benchmark, because we see a lot of volume
across NDC and EDIFACT, and can tell them where they can negotiate a bit better
and improve," Balaish said.
Wenrix also has been developing an "agent booster"
tool, which combines its automation with Large Language Model technology that
can read, parse and understand text as well as the agent operation and
workflow. That tool currently is deployed on a "small scale" with one
corporate travel agency, and early results have shown it can cut operations
costs by 70 percent, Balaish said. Wenrix aims to expand that to full coverage
with the agency within the next year, he said.
On its roadmap, Wenrix sees a "huge opportunity"
on the corporate side in being able to leverage data that TMCs have on
traveler's personal preferences and patterns to further boost automation.
"TMCs by nature have the same travelers coming back and
booking flights and hotels…so we can take that information—knowing this
traveler likes to have a flight at night and stay at a hotel with a gym—and the
corporate policies," Balaish said. "If we can digest that information
into our AI systems and logic, that will be the next generation in our ability
to increase revenues, improve the corporate traveler service and cut the
operational cost."
That innovation is part of Wenrix's "goal to be fairly
aggressive in both leisure and business travel" in terms of advancing its
technology, he said. Over the past three years, the company has seen 40 to 60
percent growth year over year in both revenue and processed volume, and the
company has signed "a pretty good amount of big logos" in the past
six months that it is now in the process of deploying, he added.
Balaish said Wenrix is well positioned to help TMCs focus on
their "white gloves" services while decreasing operational costs as
they face increased competition from the newer tech-forward players that have
entered the market in the past several years. "The big TMCs have an opportunity to
learn how they can accelerate the deployment of technology and what they can do
in order to improve efficiency," he said.