A new player, sharing DNA with a popular bygone re-shopping tool, has joined the growing field of AI "personal concierge" technology for business travelers, already armed with travel management company and large corporate buyer partners.
BizTrip.AI, which taps historical data and traveler preferences to help travelers zero in on the best booking options for their journeys via a conversational style, was co-founded by Yapta co-founder Tom Romary, who is BizTrip.AI's CEO, and AI entrepreneur Scott Persinger, who serves as the company's chief technology officer. Google Brain co-founder Andrew Ng also is a co-founder of BizTrip.AI, and his venture studio AI Fund launched the company.
Romary said the technology was designed to provide travelers "an intelligent conversation with someone you trust," comparing it to his father's longtime personal assistant during his lifetime career at Union Carbide.
"He had this assistant for 20 years that knew everything about him: that when he was in Europe, he wanted boutique hotels, and when he was in Asia, he wanted more corporate hotels," Romary said. "[The assistant knew] he wanted to be home for my baseball games and my sister's dance recitals, knew his calendar and would walk into his office not with 500 options but three."
Such recommendations come from pulling data including spend data and profile information and connecting with calendars to start planning conversations when meetings arise that require travel and detecting when travel adjustments are needed due to calendar changes. BizTrip.AI is working with Sabre for content and is complementing that with direct connections to airlines and hotels, Romary said.
Options presented are compliant with companies' policies, and the tool also allows for AI-powered exception management, he said.
Romary said BizTrip.AI in a way is fulfilling the original vision of Yapta, whose name was an acronym for "your amazing personal travel assistant." Yapta later gained its foothold in the corporate space as a price-tracking tool for airfares and hotels, with 30 TMC partners distributing or using its technology along with 8,500 corporate clients by the time it was acquired by Coupa. Coupa rolled Yapta into its Travel offering, ending its availability as a standalone product, and now is in the process of sunsetting that offering.
During its stealth mode, BizTrip.AI was even called Yacta—"your amazing corporate travel assistant"—but Romary quipped that "I didn't want a company that started with 'yac'—there's a little branding issue there."
That price-tracking and monitoring capability that drove Yapta's growth, however, is a key component of BizTrip.AI, he said. Like Yapta, the technology monitors prices after booking, applies pre-negotiated corporate rates when available and automatically secures credits and refunds when applicable. The company claims that price-tracking and reshopping can bring up to 4 percent in travel cost savings, on top of 4 percent savings from better compliance, reduced fees and less employee time spent planning travel.
"The average time it takes a busy executive to plan and execute travel and file the expense report is 10 hours per trip," Romary said. "If we can cut that in half, we're saving billions of dollars."
BizTrip.AI is launching in an increasingly competitive field of AI-powered corporate travel management technology—AI-powered corporate travel assistant SkyLink, which integrates with enterprise chat channels so that travelers can book and manage reservations in a conversational style, and Otto, an unmanaged-traveler-focused AI travel agent funded by Steve Singh's Madrona Venture Group, to name a few.
BizTrip.AI, however, already has gained some early adopters that have been trailing the tool. On the travel management side, Colorado-based Cain Travel has been using the technology, and the tool can be white-labeled by TMCs, Romary said. A solution specific for agents at TMCs is on BizTrip.AI's product roadmap, he added.
Moderna is among the large enterprise organizations that is trialing BizTrip.AI, and Jennifer Steinke, the company's director of travel, meetings and fleet, in a statement said its use was a "natural progression" of the company's strategy to improve travel program efficiency with AI.
"BizTrip.AI enhances our airfare and hotel booking processes, automates price tracking and re-shopping and allows our employees to stay focused on what matters most—delivering results for our business," according to Steinke.