India-based business travel open API platform Zenmer recently announced integrations with multiple North American low-cost carriers as it sees increased customer demand for North American travel—and the platform has designs for eventually having its own customer base in the region as well.
The latest integrations add carriers including JetBlue, Allegiant, Spirit, WestJet, Alaska Airlines, Frontier, Gol and Volaris to Zenmer's software-as-a-service platform. The announcement came a few weeks after Zenmer's addition of content from multiple EU- and U.K.-based low-cost carriers.
Founded in 2018, Zenmer was built as a cloud-native, "supplier agnostic" platform that can work across multiple global distribution systems as well as with non-GDS content. It is "PNR-independent," meaning it has its own booking management system that can ticket and service bookings within the platform.
The platform currently works with about six travel management companies in India, handling about 800 to 1,000 transactions daily, and the expanded content in Europe and North America in part was driven by international travel demand from those clients, cofounder and CEO Nikunj Agrawal said. At the same time, it will bolster its expansion plans in the U.S. and U.K. markets, with the company expecting to launch its first client in the U.K. within a quarter or so.
Zenmer also has begun targeting direct corporate customers pitching itself as a "multi-TMC platform," Agrawal said.
"If you are a corporate that is using multiple TMCs in Dubai, Singapore, the U.S. and India, and you are using different user interfaces, that only creates more confusion and bad learning curves," he said. "We can help you under a single SaaS platform, with your TMCs running the back end."
As it plans those moves, Zenmer plans to "grow very aggressively in terms of product" over the next year, Agrawal said. Capabilities of providing sustainability data at the point of sale as well as enabling purchasing offsets within the platform is "almost wrapped up," he said. Other capabilities on the way including reshopping, a real-time travel monitoring system and further integrations, including rail platform Trainline, he said.
"The overall goal is to reduce the number of tech vendors and manual processes that TMCs are using by open APIs," according to Agrawal.