Scott Hintz
As social networking continues to entice corporate travelers, and managed travel professionals grapple with its impact, one player in the thick of it all is online itinerary and travel data-sharing service TripIt. The company has enrolled more than 12,000 corporations in its Groups service, launched publicly with 1,000 just two months earlier. Groups allows participating TripIt users from the same company to see "when and where" co-workers are traveling on a company travel map. The following is an excerpt of Management.travel's May discussion with TripIt co-founder and vice president of business development Scott Hintz about travel management company deals, the Groups tool and potential new services.
What enhancements have you made in Groups?
It's not public, but we do have functionality and are selectively piloting with some groups the ability to assign administrators to the group, people who can control membership and purge people and form subgroups. So it might be just the executive team or just the New York office. [The basic service is] based on email domain, but [that's not the] case with subgroups. The admin sets up the group and invites anyone they want. A consulting firm might be able to share travel plans with clients or people in another office. It might be people with different email addresses brought together in the group. There's someone sending invites, and they manage that group and can purge people. On the receiving end, you can choose whether or not to accept an invite, and you can bow out as well.
We published an interview with consulting firm Sapient describing how the travel manager is using Yammerto communicate internally with travelers. One way to enhance that would be to integrate itineraries. Do you have any enterprise social networking partnerships in the works?
CubeTree is the one I would point to. They use our application-programming interface to populate their feeds, kind of like Twitter feeds, with the fact that "Scott's planning a trip to Houston next week," and things like that. BCD Travel uses CubeTree, and they find great value out of knowing someone will be traveling. I don't think we're integrated with Yammer yet, but it would be really easy for Yammer to integrate TripIt feeds. Our API is there on the shelf for exactly that purpose. I say I don't think we're integrated with them, but I wouldn't necessarily know. Third parties can come up and build that sort of thing-- we have all the permissioning in place--and they can ask their users if they want to grant access to their TripIt feeds and, if so, have at it. I know there are other corporate social networks out there; most are fairly small right now. There was one called Hashwork that we're integrated with, and SuccessFactors just bought CubeTree. SuccessFactors is a big software-as-a-service player, and they're in the same category as Salesforce.com [which just launched Chatter, also an enterprise social networking service.] We're already set up perfectly to interact with these types of applications like Yammer. And when we talk about Groups, it's a starting point. It's more popular than I expected. The basic functionality of making it easy to see where other people in your company are traveling sounds very simple on the surface, but you hear about these stories where it helps out in certain cases you hadn't even thought of. A lot of times you just put things out there and you can't imagine the way people will use them. That said, now that we have a definition of 'the company' within TripIt Groups, you can see how we layer in additional services we would target to the corporation. Could one of those be to prompt a traveler after his stay at a hotel to give a thumbs up or thumbs down, and then collect that content at the corporate level and share it with the travel manager? Sure, we have the plumbing to do that. Will we do that and when? I don't know right now.
The BCD Travel partnership you announced last year was not exclusive, so what does this phenomena of TMCs announcing partnership dealswith mobile itinerary software firms really mean if, say, American Express could be using both you and WorldMate if its travelers and corporations are using both?
You're spot-on, and who is to say that's not happening already? This gets back to our Groups productwhich had over 10,000 companies sign up in the first 90 days. That's where a lot of our focus is right now. We have always had direct contact with the traveler. In a lot of cases, the way these TMC deals are working out is as follows: We have thousands of travelers at a corporation using TripIt on their own, word trickles up to the corporate travel manager, the travel manager reaches out to us and says, "What is this thing?" and then the travel manager talks to their TMC. The TMC is saying, "How can we embrace this more?" So that's why we're signing those TMC deals, but we don't necessarily need the TMC. We can have direct relationships with the travelers or with the corporation. The one thing, though, that we are trying to get is direct connectivity of the passenger name records. In some cases, the TMC can be very helpful for that, and in other cases they're not and there are other ways we can get at a corporation's data.
That question of connectivity is a piece of the discussion; in other words, whether a TMC would open its data to multiple different providers of technology. Isn't it easier for a TMC to deal with one provider, saving a fair amount of programming and mapping of data?
It may start to shake out. With large TMCs, most support many different online booking tools and all of them are booking in all the global distribution systems, but then once you get to the smaller and medium-size TMCs, you tend to see a more homogenous ecosystem; they're on a single GDS. So I have a feeling that's what we'll see with the TripIt's and WorldMate's of the world, where some of the larger TMCs will probably offer both or multiple, and some of the smaller ones may focus on one. Even though contractually it won't be an exclusive relationship, practically it could be.
The benefit of working with a TMC is that connectivity, so the traveler doesn't have to manually add or email bookings, and changes are automatically updated. In the smaller or medium-size world, it's very GDS-based. Have you accomplished multi-GDS connectivity?
It's an option. Thus far, we have been able to minimize the amount of GDS interaction we have had to do. In the medium tier, a lot of them have surprised me and they have their own databases of passenger name records that they're storing locally. A few years ago, a lot of TMCs saw the need for this and they built it. If they have only one or two front-end booking tools or only one GDS, it's easier for them to build a local database of PNRs, and, in many cases, they're already integrating other third parties like FlightStats, iJet and others with similar needs to TripIt.