Altour's Rizzi discusses:
- Punching above [Altour's] weight" with Blockskye
- Finishing the Travel Leaders Corporate integration
- TMC training evolution
Travel management company Altour has seen its business get a lot more fulfilling in recent months. Two newly launched guest management platforms have entered the stage—Juno, developed by the team behind former guest travel management app Pana, and EmPath, developed by former Google travel buyer Greg Wilczek and fellow former Googler Vishal Chouhan—and Altour is providing fulfillment services for both. Blockskye and Kayak for Business also announced in April that they had selected Altour to serve as their global travel agency partner for enterprise clients.
Altour president Gabe Rizzi said that he scoffed at questions whether that servicing arm work was "drudge work." "We happily take on that work, and our partners are excited to do that." With the Blockskye/Kayak partnership, in fact, it presented an opportunity to reach an entirely new set of business.
"We become more relevant to a completely different customer set, which we never were before, and we didn't have to stand up a whole bunch of infrastructure to do that," he said. "It's not like Altour is completely changing direction; it's just increasing its addressable market, and we're doing that by partnering with a couple of key innovators in our space."
Rizzi discussed the partnership, its absorption of Travel Leaders Corporate into the Altour brand and the changing TMC competitive landscape in a recent interview with BTN executive editor Michael B. Baker. An edited transcript follows.
BTN: How is the integration of the Travel Leaders Corporate brand under Altour progressing?
Gabe Rizzi: It was always the plan. I looked at it like Altour was a lot of art, and Travel Leaders Corporate was a lot of science. We were about efficiency, effectiveness, [service level agreement] adherence, and the Altour business really opined on incredible service, but it came at a very high price. We figured, by combining the two assets, now we get a balance of art and science, and we get to embrace a brand that's unique. Travel Leaders, when we were Travel Leaders Corporate, we shared that brand with 7,000 other agencies in our network, so it was confusing to clients, it was confusing to suppliers, and it was confusing to our team members. At times, we would find ourselves competitive with ourselves. I couldn't create any demand through SEO because the Travel Leaders equity in the search engine space always biased to the network, because there's so many of them. We saw an opportunity to embrace a global brand, get rid of all the suffixes associated with travel leaders: Travel Leaders Corporate, Travel Leaders Corporate Germany. Now, we're just Altour. We spent the entire year of 2024 integrating the tech stacks, integrating the processes. It's people, process and tools. We looked at our people and said, do we have all the right people in the right roles? That was a big exercise. Then, do we have all the right processes to be the most efficient, most effective and most relevant to our clients and is the service we're delivering what our clients are looking for. Lastly, the tools and technology: What tools and technology are we bringing to market? We're not a technology shop. There's a lot of $100 million travel technology roadkill, and we didn't want to be in that camp. We partner and buy. We don't build. That's why most of our products we bring to market, like within Altour Intelligence, our AI suite of products, those are all white-labeled. So, we've spent the last year bringing our people, processes and tools together under that amalgamated Altour brand globally and all our partners, all our international partners, have developed the Altour brand.
BTN: Is that integration work done now?
Rizzi: In travel, it's kind of like painting a bridge. You're constantly working on it. But we have identified what is the build that we're building too. Our mid-office is the same across. Our back office is the same across. We support all the same booking tools. Our reporting was the last leg. That's now all on Prime Analytics, our [Business Travel Insights] product, and it's consistent across all of our clients. Whether they were Altour legacy or Travel Leaders Corporate legacy, it's all the same service models and same teams. We cut across three different service models—designated, dedicated and a pooled or contact center model—for those long-tailed clients that are small and not looking for a fully managed program. That is done, and we've also done this across our meetings business. We have four meetings businesses: Altour Meetings, Travel Leaders Corporate Meetings, On Tempo Meetings in Mexico, and YES, Your Event Solutions, in the U.K. Now, we've consolidated all that under Your Event Solutions, which is our global meetings brand, and they do about 7,000 events a year. We don't aspire to be a HelmsBriscoe. Cindy D'Aoust who runs that for me, has a saying that we're as big as you need us to be and as small as you want us to be. That's kind of what we anchor on, is that value of being adaptable and feel like an agency to those clients, more like a creative agency. We're seeing some good success and growth with that. This year has been an interesting year with all the tariffs talk and the impact it's had on corporate. We're kind of the canary in the coal mine with that regard. We're not seeing a decline over prior year—we're kind of flat—but our plan calls for growth, and the only way out of flat demand is to win more clients. That's why we've invested heavily in our commercial teams, both the meetings side and the transient side. We've never had more [requests for proposal] in flight than we do right now.
BTN: You mentioned your white label partners. What are some examples?
Rizzi: We went and looked for best in class across a couple different use cases, partnered with them, white-labeled the solution and brought it together to the market. One of those is AI Book, which is a partnership with a company called 'Ello out of Australia, and it's an LLM-enabled booking tool. It's incredibly fast, very intuitively, and literally, you just talk to it. That's coming to market now. We have a couple of clients in beta with it. We also have AI Predict, which predicts proactively flight delays or cancellations. That's a big pain point for our clients. You're in a meeting and it runs long our goes short. How do I switch my flight, and is there a 50 percent or greater chance that the flight will be delayed or canceled? I want an option before I travel all the way to the airport and sit there for four hours unnecessarily. So, that tool we brought to market, and we have a big demand for it
BTN: What is your broader AI strategy?
Rizzi: The hard part with AI, and we've been at this for two years now, is training the model. If you get into a large language model, it's only as good as the data you train it with. The hard part is, in our business, all we deal in is [personally identifiable information], and you can't go to a client at the corporate level and get consent. You have to go to the individual traveler level. Getting consent to train the models correctly has been the rub, so we've looked for ways to avoid that LLM training complexity in rolling out an AI solution. We also have a very onerous vendor assessment, because we want our clients to know that we've vetted these suppliers. We go through SOC2 compliance. We're PCI compliant. A lot of small operators that are very innovative, they can't stand up to those requirements. Although we're private, we have the policies of a public company, that way, our clients feel that and can rest assured that their data is secure. Oversee has been a terrific partner with us. We work with them on a number of reshopping initiatives and also outreach. They're providing recommendations for clients to respond to emails that may not require a human intervention. We process over 4 million emails a year, and a lot of those are not travel specific, more like I need a copy of my itinerary or invoice. Those are the things we're trying to get off email and into these AI products. So, AI Predict is a key enabler of getting those status emails the hell out of our queue. We're not trying to replace humans with AI but empower them so that they can work more directly in a more personalized way. We know our customer, and AI is helping us collate all this unstructured data in a way that we can now create these digital identities of these types of travelers, so that we're also recommending hotels they would likely book. That whole conundrum we have in hotel attachment—the industry is still around 40 percent of multi-day air bookings without a hotel attached. A lot of times, it's because their policy isn't recommending a hotel they've stayed at before, or the online experience doesn't have the rich media and content the supplier site has. We're trying to pull some of that information through these products to present a more bookable option to a client. We're working with suppliers also, because some of the Marriott Bonvoy rates might not be in the GDS, which creates an issue in [and] of itself, so we have to find a way to get that content available for our travelers so they're not booking outside the program. We're seeing some traction. Adoption is everything. A lot of clients want products bundled in with transaction fees, and when they don't pay for something, there isn't a lot of value placed on it. That's something we're working with clients one by one, to make sure we're not just backing up the product truck to them, that we're actually bringing products that match pain points they have in their current program.
BTN: Is the skill set needed to work for a TMC changing?
Rizzi: There is a different skill set. One of the things I've invested in our business is organization effectiveness and development, and I have a VP who runs that for us, and her entire remit is around lifting and providing the right training and development for the needs of the role. One of the things that we've employed now is certifications across different technologies, so that every time somebody brings up AI, they don't say, "We need our CIO in on this conversation." They know what generative AI is and what a large language model is. They know what the benefit is of it and what the complexities are, so they can have at least a 10,000-foot conversation to do a little discovery with the client and not always have to point to an overlay organization to provide them with that subject-matter expertise. So yes, there is a technology component to new hires within our space, and the skills of old need to be dusted off a bit. The skills of new are more tech-enabled, more efficiency-focused and effectiveness-focused. Our mission statement is purposeful. We say we manage the complexities of connecting people, whether it's a meeting or a trip, so they represent their brands in the most impactful way. We don't just book travel. We do it so they represent their company. I don't come from this industry. I was in five different ones before this. Many times, I didn't represent my brand in the most impactful way. I was tired, my flight was canceled, and I didn't have anyone watching my travel back. That's our goal, is to handle the messy stuff so the clients can focus on the important stuff.
BTN: What will come from the partnership with Blockskye?
Rizzi: [Blockskye co-founder and co-CEO]Michael Share is a fellow that we trust a lot. I went through a dark time personally, health-wise, and there were very few people that just reached out to say I'm thinking about you. That's who Michael Share is, the kind of person he is. We had a joint venture with him called Next Corporate Tarvel, and we worked with him for a decade. We landed some really nice pieces of business—Diageo and TripAdvisor [both now Blockskye clients] were a couple of the accounts—and he was the account manager/salesperson, and we were the fulfilment arm. So, we've been working with Michael for a long time in that regard. Fast forward, we saw them coming to market with a very disruptive, innovative approach. We weren't the domestic solution for them initially. We weren't ready for that, and we needed to get our tech stack in a pile. They built it on Amadeus, and we weren't an Amadeus shop. We're a Sabre/Travelport shop. They came to market, and we kept in touch with Michael through the process. Their big gap was global fulfillment. They can win some nice domestic brands, but every big company has a footprint outside the U.S. borders, so how do they service that? Back in 2018, when HRG got purchased by Amex GBT, there were a lot of wholly owns that got displaced, and we saw an amazing opportunity to stand up our own proprietary network. We'd been with Radius, with GlobalStar, with [Lufthansa City Center], and they repped multiple TMCs, so we had no exclusivity in that. We wanted our own, to be able to say to a client that we personally vetted this partner. When you say wholly owned versus partner, this partner isn't servicing any other TMC but us. We saw an opportunity to leverage this network we stood up, almost 60 agencies that service in 90 countries around the globe, as a servicing arm for Blockskye/Kayak for Business, but we're not going to do it in the traditional, local-servicing model, where if there are 20 countries, we have to do 20 implementations, which is hell on earth. We're standing up a centralized solution with centers in Romania, South Africa and our Mexico City office. Those become our hubs, so that we can follow the sun and leverage our Genesys mid-office telephony solution to link them all together, and we draw content from the local markets. That's really what our clients wanted, the local content, and if we need to leverage them for [a billing and settlement plan], we can do that too, and maybe currency exchange. If you think of a frame relay network, they're the nodes on the network now, and they're providing those three pieces, and our centers are doing the servicing. It's like servicing an online booking, and they're going to get a transaction fee to provide that content and have some terrific trophies in their backyard that will help them in bids and credibility in their local markets. Our obligation to our network partners is to provide them with business, and that's what this relationship is going to do.
BTN: With the American Express Global Business Travel acquisition of CWT, how do you see the competitive landscape changing?
Rizzi: Even at the megas, it's not us driving the disruption, it's the clients. The clients have bounced from BCD to CWT to GBT to FCM to CTM. We've never been fit for purpose for that, because we didn’t have the presence in those countries, nor did we have the brand recognition, where someone from procurement would say, "I'm going to go select Altour." They're like, "Al who?" It's like when I worked in the data business, we'd select IBM. Why? Nobody got fired. It's a household name. It might not have been the greatest service, but nobody is going to lose their job over it. You knew what you got. We see an opportunity now to punch above our weight, because these clients are looking for a different service model, where they may want direct access to supplier content. Some people say, "Gabe, are you going to divorce yourself from the GDS?" Hell no. All of the content will never, ever, ever, ever be direct connect. How are we going to build 160 directs? It's ludicrous. However, there are some opportunities. Interoperability is one of the biggest attractions of this configuration, where the TMC goes where the client is, versus the client having to come where the TMC is. In the traditional model, the client has to come through you with their booking tool, so if they are on the app or direct on the airline site, we can't see the booking and can't service it. In interoperability within the blockchain in this environment, we can service it wherever they are. That is a huge value prop to the client. The other thing is it simplifies reporting, because it's real-time settlement. It's not this batch settlement; the remuneration now is done on the smart contract on the blockchain for the direct connects. Otherwise, it's traditional fulfillment for us internationally, but they had a distinct need for us to provide a more efficient way to implement a global piece of business. Clients were looking for that too. The first thing they ask is how many of your sites are wholly owned, like that has a benefit. It doesn't really have that great of benefit, because in the end, it's still an agency foreign, and they're still going to have to implement locally. If you have 20 countries, you have 20 implementations. In our model, it's three. It's a big speed to market, much more efficient one bag to pack, and we can maintain service levels we might not otherwise be able to manage. The other thing is, some of these partners might not have the sophistication from a reporting standpoint, to satisfy the duty of care and data needs that our larger clients demand. That's typically what the megas have provided, is a very mature duty of care model on a global scale. We just couldn’t build that. In this model, this gives us that opportunity. It's not divorcing from the core model. SME is our bread and butter. But in these engagements, we have a couple of clients that are over $100 million in travel volume, and this model allows us to be relevant to a different tab in a different way. We're doing it in 21 markets to start, and then we go to the rest of the world. It's where the big volumes are. If a client wants local servicing and wants a local agency to do that, we can do that too. We can either go globalized, or we can go local.
BTN: What's your expectation for future growth?
Rizzi: You're going to see Altour in places you haven't seen Altour before, with some larger clients, where Altour will become relevant to those clients. We're going to continue to push our AI strategy. A lot of TMCs are looking at AI as a cost-cutting opportunity. We see it as a hyper-personalization and revenue opportunity, by providing value-add services that really matter to our customers. That's why we picked the five solutions that we did. You've seen John Rose has been a terrific advocate on duty of care and crisis management, which we don't see going away anytime soon. We see that as a real differentiator in the market, having an advisor like John Rose on staff. We have a leisure strategy that's launching. We're in beta with a couple of clients. We partnered with a unique tour operator to provide a configurator, called Altour Vacations, and it's vacation packages. It's not like CheapOAir. We're not booking a cheap ticket from Newark to Tampa. Go to an OTA for that. These are packages—cruise packages, experiential tours, foodie [experiences]. We have over a million traveler profiles in our database. They all travel personally; they just don't travel with us. They might travel with one of our affiliates in the network, but we don't know that, and every one of our corporate clients says, "Hey, how do we take advantage of leisure services from Internova? You guys are the number one purveyor of cruise. Why don't we have access to that?" We're bringing that to market, so that's a big enhancement this year.