Roadmap CEO Jeroen Van Velzen On Travel App Engagement

After 15 years of procurement-oriented travel management, Roadmap CEO Jeroen van Velzen predicted a pivot that will put a clear focus on the business traveler. What’s the return on investment of caring for the traveler? That’s the wrong question, he said, at least in the beginning. To succeed, companies must be willing to give first. To explain more, van Velzen sat down with BTN editor-in-chief Elizabeth West.

Give me the two-minute elevator pitch.

Roadmap allows the travel buyer to get his own app. And it’s not just an app but a broader perspective on how to communicate with travelers. Think of it as a communication platform with your traveler while he’s traveling. The platform allows [the corporation] to brand the app and customize it and create a sort of tone of voice that fits with the purpose of the program and fits with the corporate itself. It feels, touches, operates like an employee would expect from his employer. From a traveler perspective, it’s what you would expect from the basics of every traveler app: flight details, hotel details, everything you would expect from an itinerary app. But this is not an itinerary app; this is a trip app. It follows [the traveler] from home to home, door to door, meeting to meeting. So you have all your transport details. When you land, it tells you the best transport options to the hotel. Around the hotel, it will tell you what restaurants are very interesting to look out for, what restaurants your colleagues went to, so that’s a layer, as well. It also provides a straight [channel for] feedback to the travel manager. That is the core offering to tie the traveler experience into the purpose of program that the travel manager sets up. So what happens is you bring these two together under the umbrella of the corporate brand.

Roadmap spun out of a company called Sound of Data. Why did you pursue corporate travel, and how did Sound of Data influence what you are doing now?

Sound of Data was a communications service provider. In essence, that is still what we are doing. We are building a communication layer between the travel manager and the traveler. And there is no friction in between. There’s no supplier in between, there is no travel management company in between, there is no online booking tool—just the travel manager and the traveler. That communication is digital. That was also what Sound of Data was about but in different industries, so that’s how we learned to build digital communication services on a very mass scale. We did that for TV programs: voting for The X Factor and American Idol. So we know how to do this on a big scale but also on a tight, customized scale.

Why corporate travel?

We fell in love with the travel industry, and also it was purpose driven. We found out that no one cares for the traveler. Everyone cares about the transaction, everyone cares about the distribution, but no one cares for the traveler. The traveler, in the end, is the one that drives all the value in the entire industry. So our purpose is to drive traveler happiness and, in essence, we are going to reverse engineer the industry from the traveler perspective. And why corporate: We started out in the OTA space, in the leisure space, and we found out that they really don’t care about the traveler. They want to make their buck and get that transaction. Through a very difficult journey, we found that the corporate has a humongous opportunity to start taking care of travelers.

Adoption of TMC apps has lagged; you’ve said that corporates are willing to spend money on mobile, just not with their TMCs. Explain that a bit more.

If they are talking to their TMC, they are basically negotiating. That is the mode of their relationship. Many of the TMC offerings are commoditized. Within that negotiating space, they also negotiate: “I want an app, and I think it should be included in my booking fees.” It’s very hard for a TMC to break out of that. It’s also hard to differentiate on these offerings because they don’t have the service organization to do it and they don’t have the technical organization to do it. That, for the TMC, is very difficult. From the corporate end, if you are able to create a better traveler experience for employees, it makes perfect sense to invest in it. If you look at travel spend at, say, $20 million, it does make sense to spend $100,000 on the experience.

What is the client pipeline and in what markets are you looking to grow your client base?

The U.S. market understands this value proposition; Europe is sort of trailing in the maturity of its travel programs. We are seeing about 80 percent of our funnel is U.S.-based companies. Within that specific customer segment, we tend to see organizations struggling with two things. First, they’ve been on the procuring route for the past 15 years, and now it’s time to do something back for the travelers. So that’s one angle. And the other is around talent management. [Some] organizations know their true asset is the people that work for them, and they want to take care of their travelers and they don’t want to outsource that to a third party. They want to own that environment. So those are the typical first movers in this space.

China and other emerging markets are leapfrogging others in terms of mobile; do you see that market developing for you?

We launched our first customer in APAC, but it’s a very fragmented market. And from a talent management perspective, labor is still very inexpensive, so they don’t have a tendency to start taking care of their employees. They dig mobile; they like that. Actually, there is no other thing, so you have to have the app. But whether the app comes from the TMC an OBT … or whomever, they don’t care, as long as it does the job.

What’s the tipping point at which corporates are going to get the mobile adoption they are looking for within a corporate app? Is it a safety event or something more nuanced?

It’s the user experience that drives adoption and engagement. If you are creating an app and you can’t get the message across in 15 or 20 seconds, you are gone. It’s got to be slick; it’s got to be sexy. It has to look and feel trustworthy, and the brand should appeal to the end user, so if you don’t own that brand equity, you are 5-0 down. It’s more an art than a science.

You have said that there really isn’t an ROI in a mobile app right now, but there is a business reason. What does this mean?

You need to figure out what your travelers are doing while they are traveling. You might think you know, but you don’t, and neither do we. There are a bunch of assumptions that we need to validate on what makes sense to invest in. In many cases, what you see now is that travel managers put out a very long requirement list of what should go into an app, thinking that is what travelers want. But we don’t know what travelers want. We have to figure that out. In order to figure it out, you first have to build a relationship, and within that relationship, you can’t make any money. That doesn’t make any sense: to build a relationship and instantly require money. That’s transaction thinking. If you want to build engagement and adoption, you have to start thinking about relationship. We all know that to start a relationship, we invest first. We give more than we take. That is our reasoning for not going too fast into ROI. The ROI comes in if your travelers start adopting this stuff, and Roadmap sees adoption rates of 70 to 80 percent. Then, it starts making sense to start playing and influence with it, and that will yield the best ROI. But don’t go kill your relationship by seeking ROI too early.

This report originally appeared in the Oct. 12, 2015, edition of Business Travel News.