Offering a proprietary corporate booking tool has been a key selling point for larger travel management companies for a long time, but a growing number of midmarket TMCs are now going down this route as well.
What’s driving this strategy among TMCs and how is the rapid deployment of artificial intelligence helping them do this in a more cost-effective manner and allowing them to bring these tools to market at a faster pace?
Utah-based Christopherson Business Travel launched its new booking tool this summer as part of the wider development of its proprietary Andavo tech stack, with customer service at the heart of its strategy.
“It's really critical for us at Christopherson to control customer service delivery,” explained Josh Cameron, the TMC’s chief operating officer. “You can't do that without a digital delivery mechanism. I can't control my customer experience if I don't control the digital mechanism they're touching and interacting with the majority of the day.”
It’s a similar story for ATG Travel Worldwide with the Netherlands-based TMC set to fully launch its Baldwin booking tool within the next year after working on the project for around six years.
“The original justification was that online booking tools had not changed in a very long time—I can't think of any other technology that I use in my day-to-day life that is 26, 27 years old,” said ATG’s CEO Tammy Krings. “Plus, we just thought it could be faster and smarter and more intelligent. We've always been an early adopter of new technology.”
Canada’s Encore has gone further down the road in this process, with work on building its own technology starting in 2018 and a full tech stack, including its booking tool, launched in 2021. The TMC is now engaged in a full-scale rebuild of its OBT using completely new code, a process that’s expected to take six months.
Jake Jonassohn, Encore’s VP of commercial strategy, emphasizes that its strategy is not simply about selling a booking tool to customers but providing a comprehensive in-house tech platform to manage travel. He argues that corporates are now looking for more than just a booking tool.
“I want to give the best experience in the world and the Encore way is to bring everything inhouse—our after-hours service is inhouse, everything is us. Controlling every touchpoint that the customer uses means that everything can go by our values,” added Jonassohn.
But midmarket TMCs don’t have to completely go it alone and build from scratch themselves. Europe’s second largest TMC network Lufthansa City Center has just launched its LCC Nexus portal for its members in Germany. It has been developed in partnership with Israeli tech firm Atriis and combines both a corporate booking tool and a management platform for TMC staff. The new platform has so far been rolled out to a dozen of LCC’s TMC members.
Verena Funke, LCC’s head of corporate travel in Germany, explained the primary driver for LCC Nexus was increased demand for a new “plug and play” booking platform, as an alternative to using established third-party platforms, such as Concur or Amadeus’ Cytric tool, which Funke says can be “potentially a little bit complex” for SME clients to deploy.
“These smaller corporates may not have any travel management. They really need something which can be easily rolled out and where they still have the feeling they are in a good service environment,” added Funke.
“We believe that we can tackle corporates who potentially only use a travel agency today for flight bookings, but we can convince them with the easiness of the tool and with the content available to use it for more products than just for air.”
Easier and Quicker to Build?
Is it now easier for midscale TMCs to build their own booking tool today than five or 10 years ago? And what part is AI playing in improving speed to market, as well as rethinking functionality and the user experience?
TMCs don’t see getting the right content as a major problem these days, with the ability to pull in content from GDSs, direct connects with suppliers, NDC-enabled product and web fares.
“Technically, it's getting easier and easier from a technology standpoint,” said Christopherson’s Cameron. “AI certainly has a material impact on all of this—it doesn't solve all the problems but certainly helps. I think we can go faster, quicker, with less money.
“But I think it’s getting harder to build a user experience that makes sense. Building a thoughtful user experience, no matter what that looks like, is the most challenging part and takes a lot of time. I want it to work like my consumer tools.”
One of the challenges is to create a tool allowing travelers to book in a variety of ways—from a traditional booking interface to using a LLM (large language model)-based AI conversational tool to create the itinerary.
The speed of change these days, driven by AI, can also end up delaying the launch of some booking tools as they can seem outdated before they even go live.
“Applying something like AI, we knew it was going to be more of a discovery type of environment for a while,” said ATG’s Krings about the development of the Baldwin tool. “Every time we got to a point where we were ready to launch, it was already in a situation of being aged. We also have to move faster because AI is just beyond anything we've ever experienced in terms of speed.”
Encore’s Jonassohn urges TMCs to build their own suite of solutions encompassing not just a booking tool but the range of services needed to manage travel.
“With AI now everyone should be able to build their own solutions in a few different areas,” he said. “As long as you've got a raw data set, which every TMC does, it shouldn't be that much of a challenge to get yourself the duty-of-care and carbon tools that you need.
“What really drove our customers to move over was all of the surrounding technology. The platform perspective of it—the ability to host your itineraries and invoices, the fact that reporting is right, their duty-of-care technology built in, communication technology, agent chat, a profile. Travel is not just a booking, there's the spokes.”
Service Delivery
With AI reshaping the way booking tools are being developed, how does this impact the user experience for travelers and how is that likely to change in the next couple of years?
One key element is providing a smaller, personalized selection of travel options based on a traveler’s profile, preferences and travel history, which are also compliant with their organization’s policy.
“User experience will not be defined anymore by a flashy color, but by speediness and the quality of responses—not the quantity—which are based on your preference and your behavioral patterns,” offered Kai-Gordon Weiland, chief sales officer at Atriis. “Instead of seeing 800 compliant results, you'll see three results which are most likely going to be favored by a traveler and also within policy.”
Weiland argues that the traditional booking interface “belongs to the past” and within a couple of years may no longer be the dominant way of booking corporate travel as chat-based tools become more popular.
Choice is the key element, said Christopherson’s Cameron with its strategy to “meet our customers where they want to be.” This means offering booking options appealing to different traveler personas, whether they want to use a chat-based LLM-based platform or a more traditional booking tool experience.
Midmarket TMCs are keen to emphasize that developing their own tools does not come at the expense of staffing. They intend to use the technology to free human consultants from many of the routine tasks they are currently saddled with, so they can assist travelers when they really need it, such as when their travel plans are disrupted or they are struggling with a booking.
This means booking tools need to provide “seamless” and quick ways for travelers to switch to a consultant when necessary. Having a single system used by both travelers and consultants is seen as being a key element to achieving this goal.
“We are trying to implement AI to support areas where we can actually help the agents become more efficient,” said LCC’s Funke. “The idea is to free up more time for the agents so they can focus on personal contact with travelers.”
This switch-over process between machine and human is becoming more integrated and automated. Atriis’ Weiland suggested there could be a traffic light-style tracker on a consultant’s desktop illustrating when a traveler is struggling with a chat-based booking and needs offline help.
“They can see if a chat is getting stuck and then it's being transferred automatically into a messaging queue to the agent, and the agent takes over,” he proposed. “If you’re working in a chat environment, things are much more instant—you can’t let the customer wait for four hours for a response.”
ATG’s Krings added that offering assistance to travelers could be triggered by “something as sophisticated as having your camera on, almost like a Teams meeting, and the system reads your body language.”
“It reads where your eyes are going, and it can determine that this person's having a problem,” she said. “It can then connect the human to a human or ask them if they want to be connected. The technology can see what you're doing, where you're clicking.”
Gaining more control over the customer experience is clearly the primary driving force in midmarket TMCs’ decision to invest in booking tools. With AI set to reshape these platforms, can the often-maligned corporate booking tool start to offer the “consumer-like” experience that has been promised for years but that the industry has struggled to deliver?