Shortly after its launch, non-profiled travel management platform EmPath has added capabilities specific to travel management needs in the entertainment, sports and media sector, the company announced.
Co-founded by former Google head of travel Greg Wilczek and former Google head of data governance, architecture and digital procurement products Vishal Chouhan, EmPath is a platform through which guest travelers can book, manage, pay and be reimbursed for travel. Wilczek and Chouhan now have a specialized travel path for travelers in entertainment, sports and media, an area where Wilczek himself started in the industry as an entertainment production coordinator more than 30 years ago—and an area he said is ripe for innovation.
"Coming back to it all these years later, it is still completely manual," Wilczek said. "There's a whole new generation of coordinators approaching it how I approached it in 1993."
The sector is a "very broad category" that "goes all the way from a high school soccer team on the athletic side to Steven Spielberg on the entertainment side, and everything in between," he said. Prior to developing the specialization, he and Chouhan did discovery with production coordinators and travel managers in the industry to identify some common themes across that spectrum.
One such theme was the presence of a travel coordinator—a production coordinator for a television show or an athletics coordinator for a golf tournament—that acts as a hub, and as they are usually under tight budget requirements, they usually do the bookings themselves on behalf of the travelers, Wilczek said. Legacy booking technology usually doesn't work for them, "maybe in pieces but not holistically," and satisfaction among travelers generally is low because of the manual processes, such as emailing personal information and getting a PDF itinerary from an agency a week later, he said.
The manual process also is quite vulnerable to data breaches, with travelers' personal data sent by email and stored in shared drives, Wilczek said.
Wilczek and Chouhan brought those pain points to their engineers to develop the specialized path.
"What we were able to do is bring all of that together into a central hub and allow a coordinator console to manage the journey of the travelers from end to end, from intake down to reimbursements," Chouhan said. "[It's] all within policy and all directly within compliance and adherence in how your corporate wants to manage these travelers."
Besides being a central hub through which coordinators can keep up with all travelers related to a project, EmPath also adds data security with collected data on travelers masked from coordinators. "They know it's there and that it will pass on to the record, but they are not exposed to it," Wilczek said.
That profile data for travelers can remain in EmPath even if the traveler later has a trip with another organizer or company, so they do not have to enter it again. In essence, EmPath can be a "profile database of non-profiled travelers," Chouhan said.
EmPath's announcement comes after guest travel management app Juno, which launched around the same time as EmPath, similarly announced that it was broadening its scope to provide solutions for "complex travel" use cases that include sports, media and entertainment, as well life sciences and higher education. Wilczek said EmPath also is looking at specialized services in those verticals.