InteleTravel's Andreello discusses...
Host travel agency and travel distributor InteleTravel, building off a string of acquisitions during the
past several years, recently launched a new booking and travel
management platform, BusinessTravel.com, targeting small and midsized
business travel programs. InteleTravel VP of corporate development and strategy Kim Andreello, the former Rocketrip president who joined InteleTravel last year, spoke recently with BTN executive editor Michael B. Baker about the growth InteleTravel hopes to achieve with the new platform as well as the agency's larger corporate travel strategy. An edited transcript follows.
BTN: How did the launch of BusinessTravel.com come about?
Kim Andreello: BusinessTravel.com is a great domain, obviously. InteleTravel owned it for 12 years, and it sat dormant because they didn't know what to do with it. Part of hiring me, though I was hired as head of strategy and corporate development, was also my expertise in the business travel world, having run Rocketrip and spearheaded the corporate travel division at Mondee. They said, 'What can you do with it?' I looked into it and said the domain name is great, but you have to build something around it. It's [search engine optimization], but that's all it does.
So, we looked inside the family of brands of InteleTravel, and everything was there. We had all the contracts in the industry. We had corporate contracts with Hickory: car, air and hotel deals through Hickory that are typically reserved for large enterprises, Fortune 500 companies or the bigger [travel management companies] that buy into these. We have MGME, one of our companies that does all the MICE stuff. I said, "We have it all here. We just need to build a platform around it."
BTN: How long did that take?
Andreello: It took a while, because you know how it is if you have several companies running their own platforms and own technology. Bringing that together and making it seamless for customers took a good year to do . We pulled it off, and we combined all the family of brands of InteleTravel into BusinessTravel.com. I've been on the SMB side and on the startup side: shoe-strung, you have to travel for your business if you want to get somewhere. It's a necessity, and it's expensive no matter what. A lot of startups, and SMBs can't afford to buy Concur, or even Navan, Engine or all of these other competitors. There's quite an expense out there, and it's usually volume-driven. It's cheap if you buy in for four or five travelers, but if you have 10 travelers or more, they stack it and it gets really expensive. I said, "Let's break that with BusinessTravel.com."
We're not pricing it out based on how many travelers you have. We have a flat fee for a month. You get access to the platform. You get corporate discount rates, enterprise-grade tools that are typically reserved for Fortune 500s or other large enterprises, but we make it availed to SMBs at a really fair monthly price, and we even give you a seven-day trial.
We have all the things we can provide to you from InteleTravel. You can have a bleisure, blended travel module in there, things like activities, cruises and tours, we throw in there. We get you connected to MGME, our MICE partner, if you're a small company and need to pull your employees together for an offsite, a monthly get-together or incentive travel, or if you need to put a conference together. MGME can do that. Then Tickitto? Why not? I have a business trip to New York or a conference in Seattle. Why not go to an NBA game or watch a concert? We throw that in at discounted rates.
We will make the platform available to all the 150,000 InteleTravel advisors. Will they all take it? No, we're looking at maybe 1 to 5 percent of them to say, "I'll become a business travel advisor," because it's more work but higher reward. Business travel happens every week, whereas leisure travel, they book three to five times a year. If we sign 1 percent, that's 1,500 advisors.
BTN: Are you targeting unmanaged programs or ones that are currently managed?
Andreello: It's mainly for the unmanaged. There are so many SMBs that are allowing their travelers just to go to Booking.com or any public [online travel agency]. They manage it on Excel sheets. Unmanaged companies don't have travel managers. The admin is doing it, or the president or owner themselves. That's the typical target.
However, we have in the platform functionality like policy settings. You can group teams, like the sales and engineering team. You can set policies for them. There's expense management. It's a corporate-grade tool, things you find on a Concur or higher-priced item. If there's a medium-sized business that already has a booking platform or a TMC, but the costs are outrageous, they can look at us. There's an OBT we can use, and I can 24/7 customer support, which is TMC-ish. They're not personal and don't respond to me only, but they're available 24/7. I have a platform where I can set my company policies and expense management reporting, all the stuff I'm currently paying the TMCs for.
BTN: In what geographies will it be available?
Andreello: The U.S. for sure. The next rollout will be U.K. and Ireland. Eventually, we could have this rolled out globally, but we're focused for sure on the U.S. for now.
BTN: Do you already have active users?
Andreello: We had a soft launch last year, in November. We had a couple of people sign up, testing the platform. You run into typical snags that you can then polish and make sure it runs smoothly. We have a few customers signed up and using it.
BTN: Besides BusinessTravel.com, what's your wider strategy for growing corporate travel at InteleTravel?
Andreello: Besides running BusinessTravel.com, I'm the VP of strategy and corporate development for InteleTravel. InteleTravel's general focus is to grow, and we grow through a couple of different strategies. One is worldwide expansion. There are several parts of the world we're looking at right now, and we're looking at partnerships and opening offices there. The UK and Ireland, we've been there for a few years. We're about to announce Dubai, and we're heavily engaged in Europe at the moment.
We're always looking at acquisitions that enrich our advisor's portfolio. We acquired Tickitto to give them the event space, because even travel, or gig travel as they call it is a big thing. Taylor Swift started this all, but now, people are no longer looking at, 'I'm going to Spain, what is there to do?' but 'I'm going to a concert in Spain, so I might as well do something around it.' We acquired Major Travel, which is a packaged luxury, to get it in the hands of MGME with all their MICE capabilities. The strategy for the next two to three years is to acquire more businesses in the travel industry that enrich our portfolio. We're not looking at duplication. We're not buying another MICE company, but we're looking at unique opportunities, so our advisors get the best of the best.