Customers of Booking.com’s business travel platform will soonhave
access to off-channel booking data capture capabilities from Traxo, the two
companies will announce today. The partnership will open up the email-based
data parsing and reporting services to the nearly 600,000 small and midsize
companies who are registered to use the leisure travel giant’s light-touch business
travel management tools.
The partnership will add to Booking’s growing feature set for small
and midsize companies to gain visibility into business travel activities and
deliver select managed travel services. Booking took a minority stake in Serko
in 2019 to deliver the Booking.com for Business platform, which is powered by Serko’s
Zeno tool. CWT just last month joined the list of providers to add no-fee agent
services to the mix.
With Traxo, which until now has targeted enterprise companies,
Booking customers will be able to throw a net under transactions not made on the
Booking.com for Business platform but nevertheless add to a given customer's total
business travel picture.
“Our clients value comprehensive visibility into their
travel program. Via this partnership… [they] will gain enhanced duty of care
oversight, and travel data distribution tools, regardless of where bookings are
made,” director of Booking.com for Business Joshua Wood said in a statement.
Traxo provides an email integration that detects travel-related
information on incoming messaging. It parses that data behind the scenes and
delivers it to the customer, in this case, via Booking’s Zeno-powered business
travel dashboard.
“Basically, it boils down to two things,” Traxo CEO Andres
Fabris told BTN about the value the partnership will deliver to Booking
customers. “Full data visibility into any booking made—not limited to
Booking.com. Then add portability to the data. We display it back to the owner
through the Booking.com for Business dashboard and also send that downstream to
a variety of endpoints.”
Booking has prioritized three endpoints to serve its
customers: duty of care, expense and value added tax reclaim, said Fabris, but the
companies are looking to add value by extended that list to a number of other
business travel entities that would benefit the small and midsize segment.
According to a recent Serko earnings report, Booking.com for
Business customers aren’t always active. Serko estimated approximately a
quarter of the 600,000 companies registered for the service used
it in a period of 12 months, and each company may have a limited number of bookings
annually.
Even so, the Traxo addition to the Booking.com for Business
roster of services is yet another example of an industry looking to mine the
value of embedded in the vast landscape of the unmanaged and lightly managed business
travel segment, where companies likely are not partnered with travel management
companies and do not have formal duty of care around business travel.
Fabris said Traxo will be looking for additional partners in
this space, now that the company has the self-serve version that makes it easy
for such companies to sign up. He pointed to the banking sector as a prime
target, where the industry has seen a number of acquisitions—like Frosch byJPMorgan
Chase and TravelBank by U.S. Bank—aimed to wrap leisure and business travel
services around existing card services for small and midsize companies.
“If you have a big collection of SMBs and you want to
provide with them with real travel visibility, we have that solution,” said
Fabris.