TakeTwo's Thelen discusses:
- A growth strategy that does not include acquisitions
- Attracting talent for "controlled" growth
- Forthcoming NDC and AI solutions
It's been almost two years since the arrival of TakeTwo Travel Solutions, a start-up boutique travel management company that launched in September 2021 in the U.K. and expanded its operations to the U.S. a few months later. From its start of recruiting staff from those who had lost their jobs amid the Covid-19 pandemic, TakeTwo now has grown to about 130 employees across the transatlantic region and is "winning clients that are moving to us on both sides of the Atlantic," according to CEO Chris Thelen. Thelen, the former North America CEO for Corporate Travel Management who launched TakeTwo alongside former CTM U.K. general manager Julie Cope, recently spoke with BTN executive editor Michael B. Baker about TakeTwo's U.S. expansion, tech strategy and long-term plans.
BTN: How has TakeTwo's expansion in the U.S. been progressing?
Chris Thelen: The U.S. has been a success story for us. The first six months of this year, we posted over $20 million of business, so that's going well. If you consider we're a startup—we didn't acquire—we have some good brand names behind us. As a CEO, you always want more and demand more, but when I step back and look at things, I'm pleased. Our model of delivering a transatlantic solution, of being a global boutique TMC, is working really well from that side. There are not many other people competing in our space for what we're doing.
BTN: Are there any particular vertical or customer types with which you are performing well?
Thelen: It's mostly ones who are demanding. What we're doing really well is delivering unprecedented service levels. We have good quality agents, and we're answering the phones in less than 20 seconds, and we're doing that consistently for our clients. We're looking after entertainment, we're looking after financial services, we're looking after tech. The core component is, travel is crucial is what they're doing. They want to be able to get through to a team they know and have an empowered account manager who has the ability to get things done and for our support services to be available to get things done.
We're also able to offer a suite of products to our clients. We've not gotten into the game of building our own booking tool or those things. We know there's going to be another product that's going to come out that we will be able to make sure our clients have access to rather than competing in the arms race around that.
BTN: From the customer side, what is the advantage of your strategy versus growth via acquisition?
Thelen: It's about getting it right. We did one acquisition, which was Eton Travel Group in the U.K., which delivered a number of synergies across the [company], but we're focused on our customers and what they need. One of the things the clients come back to me and say is, we appreciate your flexibility in terms of what you're doing, what they need and how we'll be able to do that. As other companies are building their own solution, they box everything in and do all of those things, and you lose that ability to be flexible in the marketplace.
BTN: What's your strategy with tech partnerships? We've seen recent relationship announcements, such as with Snowfall and Jyrney.
Thelen: Our partnership strategy is to work with our partners across the board, and the Jyrney solution is amazing. The ground transportation market is massive, and most of it is untapped. The things we're delivering to clients in the air and on hotels need to be provided in ground transportation too, and it can be done quickly with tech and integrating into our ecosystem. Those are things that are really exciting for us, to be able to bring that innovation quickly to market and to customers.
BTN: As a relatively new player, how are you approaching talent acquisition, given the heavy competition for talent in the TMC space?
Thelen: We have a reputation, and that's important, and our employees are important. Our employees love what they do here, and that goes out to former colleagues and people that they know in the industry. From our perspective, we have a bench on both sides of the Atlantic of employees who want to come to work for us. Bigger companies, they're in these virtual call centers that don't know much about the client or any of those things. That's what we take them up on that journey. There's been a lot of agencies in the marketplace who've grown a lot in the pandemic and taken a lot of marketshare, but they can't necessarily manage everything that they've won. We want to control that. If we don't, the reputation of what TakeTwo is about and what we're trying to achieve just doesn't resonate in the way that we want it to be.
We're very controlled in who we work with and that we have the right team to look after that. We're in a unique position that we've been able to build the business around that.
BTN: What are the most pressing needs customers are asking you to fulfill?
Thelen: There are key things around sustainability, meeting those targets and doing those things in the right way. There's dealing with the fragmented market going on with all sorts of different carriers and having different policies and bringing some level of solution to all of those things. Really what the clients want is to take them on the journey of where they are and the different things they need as they evolve.
There's a recent client who joined us and budgeted $1.5 million for the year, but they spent that in three months, so we're having to evolve that very quickly. In the new virtual world, our clients are operating, our event and group divisions are growing beyond double-digit growth. The lead-in times to do things like that are getting shorter and shorter, so being able to be reactive around those things along with content, sustainability and risk.
BTN: In particular to that fragmented market, how are you approaching challenges related to the New Distribution Capability?
Thelen: We're literally weeks away to delivering our own NDC solution, and we're really excited about that. In the meantime, we've been doing what everybody else has been doing. We are taking NDC bookings. Our customers do have a choice. A number of clients do change things quite quickly, so sometimes they might not choose to do those things. In the marketplace, there are agencies out there choosing to restrict content in one form or another for varying reasons. I wonder why [they] do that, because the customer needs content and needs it consistently to meet their needs.
BTN: How is TakeTwo looking to tap into AI technology?
Thelen: We're looking at how we can help support our agents across the board. There are great synergies that come through and deliver some really time-saving activities without losing that human touch of what our clients need. There are lots of good opportunities we are looking at to speed up the agent's time to be able to return an email with the right options consistently in the right form across the board. We're in the final phases of that, too. What we like is to know our customers well. We don't want to replace our solution, but there are ways we can enhance our productivity, so it's exciting to see.
BTN: What is TakeTwo's long-term roadmap? Are you looking at growth outside the transatlantic market?
Thelen: We want to organically grow our [transatlantic] business, and we will be opportunistic in other markets around the globe. We're part of the GlobalStar network. We work with some amazing, leading TMCs around the world that are part of that network that can deliver culturally a service very similar to us. What we can give them is our tech and our platform to meet our standards and way of doing it but still giving the local requirements.
The whole playbook's been ripped up with travel, and what's interesting to me is clients are looking cyclically at their global spend, whereas before it was one-size-fits-all. Clients we're looking at, TakeTwo has between 85 to 90 percent of spend being transatlantic, so that model works right well for us.