TravelBank's Chung discusses:
- The "snowball effect" of NDC
- Brainstorming bundles potential
- Reaching 1,800 users on consolidated offering
with U.S. Bank
Travel and expense management company TravelBank is about
two years in to both its initial New Distribution Capability content kickoff
with United Airlines and American Airlines and its consolidated travel, payment
and expense offering with U.S. Bank, which acquired
the SME-focused platform in 2021. TravelBank co-founder and CEO Duke Chung
spoke recently with BTN executive editor Michael B. Baker about progress the
platform has made over that period with NDC—as a self-described "early
adopter" of the technology—as well as an update on its collaboration with
U.S. Bank. An edited transcript follows.
BTN: What level of NDC adoption are you seeing?
Duke Chung: We're seeing tremendous traction on NDC.
We were one of the earlier adopters. We did the integrations with
United early on and American. We've
added Lufthansa, Singapore Airlines and a few others. Delta is announcing
they are progressing in this direction as well, and we are staying close with
them. The utilization, they've all met our expectations. You're seeing
incredible, positive experiences from our users. The personalization is really
incredible. Now, the traveler profiles, even your loyalty with the airlines,
can be passed through the travel history. Real-time pricing has been one of the
flagship benefits, and we're getting access to live pricing and avoiding
outdated fares. Passing through historical [global distribution systems],
sometimes those things happen.
Putting the banking hat on, what has been an important role
for NDC that we undervalued is things for finance teams. The NDC has given more
control when it comes to things like policy and compliance management, spend
visibility, looking at the travelers' history and all that information. It's
easier for the finance team to gain access to that, since we have a direct connect
in there.
Overall, it's met our expectations, and we're working now on
the next phase, some of the additional benefits on ancillaries, the bundles.
Some airlines are experimenting with things like limited time offers that can
be passed through. That is starting to help further differentiate providers
like us that are working with NDC over more legacy providers, when it comes to
comprehensive content access.
From a utility perspective, one of the reasons why a lot of
customers choose us is because we have the ability to let our customers do a
lot of self-service functionality. It's not just setting up your systems and
turning on your card and expense and travel but making it easy in travel for
things like rebooking, cancelling and modifying NDC bookings. NDC has allowed
us to continue on the mindset of being able to provide that for our users. It's
been a work in progress. It's taken a while to get it going, but when the
digital travel agencies like us started to arrive and we have the technology
capabilities to integrate in, by leaning in, the airlines are also leaning in,
and you're seeing this snowball effect of building a more progressive roadmap
together about what's possible in the future.
BTN: Is
savings still the biggest draw to NDC?
Chung: The airlines are offering a better price, and
ultimately that price can get passed on to our customers, but getting NDC
adoption had historically been a significant challenge. Initially, it was very
possible that the airlines made pricing one of the carrots in order to get
people to build out NDC, because they have to get people on there. It continues
to be a key benefit, but they realized they can pass on a lot of features and
attributes. As a technology-first company and a user-experience-focused solution
provider, those are the things that get us excited, because we can build with
the NDC capability and deliver a unique experience that is a lot harder for
some of the older competitors to provide.
BTN: What about in terms of content?
Chung: When I look at all the content, you want full
access to everything. You don't want a filtered version of that. Whether
they're intentionally doing it or not I don’t know, but clearly, it's helping
those that have an NDC connection, because the last thing we want is for our
clients to be searching on our system and see other flights, fares or pricing
available. When the consistency isn't there, we lose a lot of credibility as a
digital travel agency provider. As close as we can get to the fares that the
airlines have on their site, the better, both from a comprehensive perspective
and from a low-fares perspective.
BTN: You mentioned that you are seeing ease of
servicing, where that has been a challenge for some NDC adoptions. Was that
ease immediate, or was it a journey?
Chung: Some of the older systems had some of that functionality,
but it wasn't that streamlined. When you have this direct connect through NDC,
you're integrating directly into the airline system, so a lot of these changes
are immediate, and you can give control to the users. They do it themselves and
see it update right away. The expectations these days are instant gratification
for everything, and this falls in line with that. I give the airlines that are
supporting NDC a lot of credit, because they are looking at what providers like
us, the booking providers, are needing and working with us really closely on
how they continue to enhance their data, the access of other things within
their booking environments to give us control. It's been a gradual path toward
making it better and better over time. With United and American going
first—these are large airlines that have a lot of resources and have been
working on this for many years—it probably wouldn't have happened if it wasn't
these two leaning into it so much in the beginning. They continue to put more
[resources] behind it as well. So directionally, it's all what we wanted to
see.
BTN: With the availability of bundles, have you seen
any progress around corporate customers being able to negotiate those with
airlines?
Chung: The airlines are becoming more creative around
bundles. Those are the conversations we're having. I would characterize them as
in a brainstorm mode. They are thinking about what's important, what's
possible. Between that and lower fares, bundles and ancillaries, these are the
key things the airlines are bringing to the table and saying this is what NDC
can really empower us with. Bundle offers is a big bucket. It can be a lot of
different things, but the opportunity to have this conversation with them and
be able to provide something is very valuable.
BTN: We've seen research indicating it might be a
slow and steady adoption curve of NDC for corporate going forward. Are we
any closer to where this is just a part of the travel landscape and not as big
of a topic of discussion?
Chung: We're getting to the point now. NDC is really
transparent to our clients. They don't have to know what's happening behind the
scenes to make that content available to them. Some of the travel managers may
ask us about it in the pre-sales process, but they just assume you already are
doing the work to make it happen. We're already kind of entering that phase. In
the early few years, we'd hear a lot of those questions. Now it's a checkbox
during the sales processes. Do you support these, which airlines do you have
and what's your roadmap? We're getting into that maturity phase, where it's
just assumed. When I think about the legacy travel providers, I would imagine
they're building their own strategies to bring in NDC, because if you don't,
you lose a lot of the additional features it comes with.
BTN: How is your joint offering with U.S. Bank
progressing?
Chung: Part of the reason we came together with U.S.
bank was to continue our journey toward this all-in-one card expense and travel
capabilities. With us bringing expense and travel management capabilities to
the table, the card was really the bank's side of the expertise in payments. In
the first 18 months, we worked together on building an all-in-one solution that
included a card program, and expense solution and travel, and that product is
Commercial Rewards Card, which
launched in Q3 of 2023. It's been in market now close to two years and has
grown phenomenally well in that period of time. We have about 1,800 clients on
the system, from zero, and our mission was to bring together one user
experience that has your card program, expense and travel—so users don't have
to have three different apps on their phone, one to check their credit card one
to do their expense report and one to book their travel.
BTN: Are there any segments or verticals where you've
seen the strongest growth?
Chung: Manufacturing and services businesses are particularly popular
with our Commercial Rewards Card program. We still have a good number of technology
companies on our platform as well. From a profile, $10 million to $150 million
revenue companies is the segment where our solution is a great fit. The
majority of the customers in this segment don't have a solution in place. They
are doing it manually. They don’t have a travel management program yet. They
may have a very basic expense solution, but most likely, they're still using
Excel. Most, skewing toward the lower end, don't have a card program where the corporate
liability is in place. [The card programs they have currently] are personal liability, where the owners are
responsible, so the Commercial Rewards Card provides a program where there's corporate
liability and the bank takes the liability risk. So, you have a solution that
for most, we're the first all-in-one solution the company has used. We're still
in the very early innings. The velocity with this is growing. I think we can
get to serving thousands and thousands of customers.
BTN: What has it meant in terms of data?
Chung: With the whole movement in data and AI now,
one big component of bringing together an all-in-one solution is you have a
very large data set. When you look at the volume of card transactions that go through
U.S. Bank payments from our clients, it's billions of data transactions, and
that coupled with expense and travel becomes a valuable data repository for us
to really begin to personalize the experiences to a level that would have been
much harder for us as a startup to do. We could build [large language models],
but you don't have enough data to train it on. Here you have the trifecta of
bringing all this together in one place, and there's a lot of exciting work
we're working on in progressing with the data and bringing those experiences at
a much deeper level.