About six months into an experimental project of providing a blockchain-based portal for U.S. employees to book leisure trips, EY's travel team is ready for global expansion and an added hotel component. More importantly, however, it is coming away with a "clear case" that such a set-up could be used in a larger corporate booking environment, global innovation and technology lead Ian Spearing said.
The blockchain endeavor began to sprout about three years, spurred by a desire to access personalized content as promised by the New Distribution Capability standard. Like many travel professionals, Spearing, who stressed that all his comments represent his own opinion and not necessarily that of EY or its member firms, said that while he was seeing "great strides" in the industry on advancing the standard, "we felt the progression over the 10-year period has been quite the long journey."
The major pain point was the need to align an online booking tool, a global distribution system, a travel management company and airlines to access the content, which was not feasible for the EY teams on a large scale.
"We are best-in-market from a tech perspective," Spearing said. "If you have all those in place, you could receive some NDC content, but our program didn't allow us to do that, because we have more than 100 markets where we have a travel program with multiple technology vendors and multiple agencies."
As such, the EY teams began exploring startups and disruptors that potentially could be "supplemental suppliers," he said. They came across blockchain-based travel network Winding Tree, at the time a nascent company that had just announced an integration with Air Canada's direct-connect API. They worked with Winding Tree for a couple of months on a project of "purely discovery" to see how content was received through the platform.
Satisfied with those results, the teams decided to expand it to a larger use case, in which an airline partner could provide special offers that employees could access for leisure purposes.
"We are trying to offer more to our employees around talent retention and attraction," Spearing said, "so we took it upon ourselves to see how we could purpose this technology in the leisure space and bring something different to employees."
The EY teams presented the idea to its global airline partners and found two large U.S. carriers—which the company has not yet named publicly—that were willing to participate. For the front end of the booking portal, they tapped their own internal talent to build a tool through which employees could search, connect to the Winding Tree platform and, with blockchain authentication, connect directly to the carriers.
The portal launched last March and since has facilitated about 1,000 leisure bookings for employees, Spearing said. It's hosted on EY's internal SharePoint page for travel, meetings and events, which Spearing is one of the most visited sites within the company. Employees also received notification of the offering via direct messages with a link.
"The parameters we sent to the suppliers was that this was something you could use to build a unique proposition for you as a traveler, something you would not be able to construct on the dot-com site," he said. "We wanted to really test how someone can build a combination of discounts and benefits that can be packaged together, depending on the types of routes they would select, that is not fully constructed in the current GDS."
Feedback from employees has been "great," praising the innovation of the portal, Spearing said.
A Global Look
The offering started for EY's U.S. employees only, as offering it on a global scale would have added time to its development, and the company wanted to "innovate quickly and fail fast if it did not work," Spearing said. Now that it's proven a success, it will expand the offering to employees globally, so employees outside of the U.S. can book flights inbound to the U.S. on it.
In the coming weeks, the teams also will be adding a hotel component to the portal, in particular focusing on employees who need long hotel stays for project purposes.
EY has a lot of client-facing teams who visit the same city multiple times for stays of several weeks' duration, and those employees tend to need amenities not offered in usual corporate hotel bookings: dry cleaning and gym access, for example. In addition, while such stays are usually booked via the agency or GDS the first time, employees once at the hotel often must extend their stay, which they do directly with the hotel.
"We then lose visibility," Spearing said. "This is a way to bring that back into corporate visibility and provide from a risk and security perspective view of where people are traveling, which is really important, but we also can offer personalized and tailored rates for people staying in hotels for long periods of time."
The EY teams built out a new user interface for hotels and is working with two large hoteliers to provide offers with project rates, but it also is looking into offering consumer leisure content from the hotels, he said. The hotel project will be available globally upon its launch.
Even as it expands availability of the airline leisure offering, the teams have no plans at the present to bring the blockchain project to the corporate side of bookings. The intent was never, Spearing said, to move distribution out of the corporate channels.
"There's an absolute need for TMCs, booking tools and GDSs for programs of our size," he said. "This was just a technology exploration, and we always focused on the leisure area first."
Even so, independent of the teams' own corporate booking strategy, Spearing said the project has given a "clear use case" in connecting to a supplier from Winding Tree or another blockchain platform that could apply to the corporate space, particularly in providing content via smart contracts.
"We've definitely identified and proved that there is supply chain efficiency and visibility improvements by connecting directly in the leisure space," Spearing said. "As a corporate buyer, you can personalize content and fare bundles that might not be available in the current ecosystem today."
Travel technology provider Simard, launched in 2021 by Winding Tree founder Pedro Renaud Anderson and travel technology consultant Mathieu Tahon, in recent months announced it was developing further pilot projects to provide use cases for its Smart Contracts product. Those include collaborations with both Atriis and NuTravel.
If such approaches get more structured and widely adopted in the coming years, the initial project has it better prepared to adapt to new distribution developments, Spearing said.
"We've positioned ourselves for the future, and that's what the EY program is all about: Testing something that might be used in a few years' time and embedding it somewhere that doesn't cause any conflict for anyone in our corporate booking travel experience," he said. "If anything was to change in the future, we have a number of years under our belts understanding how blockchain works, and we can connect to the necessary suppliers."
In the meantime, Spearing said he hoped to see other such experimentation across the corporate travel industry.
"People need to stop procrastinating and get on with testing stuff," Spearing said. "It's OK if it fails, but by not doing anything, we're not helping anyone, and the only one being penalized is the end user, the traveler."