Today, Traxo, a next-generation itinerary aggregation
technology, will announce a partnership with Cornerstone Information Systems.
The partnership will target off-channel booking data and offer both travel
management company and enterprise clients deeper visibility into increasingly
fragmented booking behaviors. As more TMCs and enterprises have to deal with
“leakage”—and others simply accept it as the natural evolution of business
travel—the partnership should attract keen interest.
“TMCs are tasked with the governance and stewardship of the
entire travel management process. Being able to bring in direct supplier
bookings is key both in the mid-office and reservation process that we are
tasked with providing them,” said Cornerstone co-founder and CEO Mat Orrego.
“We did a lot of due diligence,” he added. “And what we were
really looking for was a tech platform that was open and had different
methodologies for acquiring direct supplier bookings.”
The brains behind Traxo understand travel. CEO Andres Fabris
has a 20-year background with Sabre, Travelocity and World Choice Travel, but
the company has taken a different tack from itinerary management compatriots like
TripIt and WorldMate in terms of how it collects itinerary data. Instead of
email parsing, which requires end-users to forward email-based booking
confirmations to an app, Traxo operates on more of a personal finance model in
the vein of Mint, said Fabris.
“What we’ve done is really focus on Web aggregation and
[application program interface] integrations, and we’ve really studied what
occurred in the financial services space. … What happened in that space is that
a site called Mint.com came along and flipped the model around. Instead of the
users having to upload all their data every month, [Mint] allowed them to set
up their account once and tell Mint where they have [financial] accounts so
that the technology can proactively monitor those and pull in the information.”
The travel industry exhibits many of the same
characteristics as the financial services space: It’s massive, and it’s
fragmented. “So we have deployed a lot of the same techniques to make it as
easy as possible to collect information on behalf of the traveler. In every
case, it is 100 percent traveler opt-in,” said Fabris.
For good measure, Traxo has built in all the methods for
gathering travel information: manual data entry, email parsing and automated
data pulls. During the registration process, users give the app permission to
pull data from any travel suppliers they use and then aggregate that data into
a single itinerary for the user. The Traxo-Cornerstone partnership reveals opportunities
when you translate that into the larger TMC and enterprise environment so companies
can collect and track that data for individual travelers and incorporate that
into their workflows and reporting.
Cornerstone will integrate Traxo into its existing iBank
product and will introduce TravelOptix, a collection of analytical services ranging
from policy management to itinerary building and sharing in the coming weeks.
For Traxo, the partnership itself is a huge opportunity, and
its fruition is the anticipated gateway into potentially more than 500 TMC
clients. “We’ve been working closely with Cornerstone for the past year to
understand their needs and the market needs,” said Fabris. “The next question
is how we get it into the TMC workflow, and we’ve tried to solve for that
problem. Cornerstone is a market leader there, so it was an obvious choice for
us.”
“The world is driven by people who travel. There are a lot of changes going on in terms of where travelers are going to get their reservations,” said Orrego. “Our challenge becomes one of chasing the data and chasing the traveler. It used to be just keeping up with the agency, but now we have to keep up with the traveler. It’s exciting to work with companies like Traxo that have been working with the consumer for a long time.”