Corporate dining program
provider Dinova and recommendation platform Tripism have partnered to create a user-driven
dining app for corporate travel customers. Through the integration, employees can see the more than 14,000 preferred
restaurants in Dinova’s business dining marketplace, as well as rate, review and
share their business dining experiences with co-workers.
Atlanta-based Dinova recently received funding from investment firm
Frontier Capital. Dinova CEO Vic Macchio told BTN at the time it would use that
cash infusion to enhance the end-user experience. "Traditionally, we have
focused on the travel manager as our priority," he said. "But more
travel managers are telling us that the decision-making and empowerment is with
the end user. So we want to double down on providing a richer experience."
The integration with
Tripism is Dinova's first technology announcement since then.
According
to the company's press release, Tripism and Dinova undertook the integration project at the
behest of a "mutual corporate client" but did not disclose which client.
U.K.-based Tripism's highest-profile
customer is Microsoft, which has worked with the travel tech startup for several
years to develop
the platform. The tech giant broadly launched Tripism to its travelers this
past January and recently became a Dinova customer. Tripism CEO Adam Kerr said at that time that the Microsoft
relationship "provided a great opportunity to develop and refine our
offering and we are now looking forward to engaging further corporate clients.”
Macchio indicated that the partnership with Tripism was just
the beginning of Dinova's efforts to integrate with a host of corporate travel
apps—particularly those providing a holistic resource for travelers. "All
the major TMCs are working on these types of umbrella apps that host additional
apps underneath and provide a seamless experience. We've always been supplier
agnostic. We want to work with all of them," he said.
For now, Dinova relies on user-driven
content to provide restaurant recommendations in Tripism, but Macchio told BTN
that Dinova's future ambitions lie in machine learning to identify dining
patterns for different meals and different locations to support data-driven
personalization. "We are not at the level of personalization that we
aspire to, but [artificial intelligence] is absolutely our goal," he said.