TRX Reinventing As It Grows

Travel management technology company TRX rapidly is reinventing itself, even as president and CEO Trip Davis expects revenue to double in the next few years as the result of "the growth of online players, reengineering of traditional agencies and emerging markets."

The reinvention is coming through an intensive management review process and the redesigning of every one of its tools. Davis described the company's research and development budget for this undertaking as "a multiple six-figure annual investment."

In pursuing a rigorous approach to what Davis called "top grading and performance management," Davis is focusing on separating the wheat from the management and employee chaff. He is using intensive twice-yearly reviews aimed at identifying 'A' players. The company will replace those who don't rate that designation. This is a process the company started in 2000 with its top 60 people.

"Each year, it has gotten more sophisticated and more intense," Davis said. This wasn't done to generate layoffs, which Davis called, "a sign of weakness," but rather to gear the organization to become larger.

The thinking behind this process is similar to the approach TRX has to its technology. Also since 2000, TRX holds what it calls its Refresh event twice a year in which the company attacks its own solutions. The idea, Davis said, is to "not be afraid to kill the baby."

In the past year or so, TRX has built its new ResX product on the .net platform, completely revised the DataTrax reporting tool to provide more global data in real time and began a new initiative to re-platform the entire mid-office offering in less than 12 months.

TRX last month said that through October it would increase by 50 percent development resources for the ResX corporate online booking solution "to accelerate the solution's time to market and raise development, delivery and communication standards." TRX said ResX has a consolidated average growth rate of nearly 70 percent during the past year and a half. The product now has 50 distributor program partners, 1,000 corporate accounts and 1.8 million end users, TRX said.

"We are reconfirming that ResX is a key component of our travel management clients' low-cost, online offering," Davis said in a press statement. "As a company, TRX refreshes its strategy every six months. It's religion here at TRX. We evaluate our solutions, challenge our strategic direction and look at things we should expand, start, sell or stop."

Davis said the product works hand in hand with TRX's Selex agent desktop, a multi-source, Web-based agent tool. "We want to raise the bar on solution quality and provide client-driven features and functionality more rapidly," he said. "We see the combination of ResX for online booking and Selex for agent service as the future model. We remain committed to providing our clients with strategic, operational and financial advantages."

TRX claimed ResX is the leading corporate booking engine not owned by a global distribution system provider.

Davis said one-third of TRX's business is European, following its January acquisition of shares previously held by Hogg Robinson and Kuoni.