GBTA 2015 in Orlando was buzzing with excitement last month! With over 6,000 attendees, including Kevin Bacon and Steve Wozniak headlining as keynote speakers, it was the place to be in Corporate Travel. It was especially exciting for the Traxo team, coming on the heels of our two big announcements: the launch of our new white label mobile app, and our recent integration partnership with Cornerstone Information Systems. Our booth was humming non-stop with guests interested in demos of the suite of Traxo for Business solutions, from email parsing to itinerary management and data aggregation services to the slick new white label mobile app.
After attending a number of fantastic panel discussions, the hottest topics this year seemed to be mobile solutions, virtual payments, and (no surprise) itinerary data aggregation. Mobility was the front-runner, though, and with over 19 vendors providing various mobility solutions, it’s clear that the industry continues to seek solutions to their challenges in a mobile-driven world.
The new Traxo for Business white label mobile app squares perfectly with this need, enabling TMCs and their clients to directly incorporate ALL of the traveler’s bookings (both on & off platform) into a single itinerary management app, using their own brand. This solves a major problem for TMCs in particular, since it allows them to build on the brand relationship directly with the traveler, instead of sending them off to a competing third-party app.
The ever-popular “Open Booking” conundrum was still a large part of the conversation. Panel discussions on the “Open Booking” topic were very insightful, and it seems that the industry has definitely evolved from completely rejecting the premise to accepting that out-of-program bookings are a part of corporate travel and here to stay. To some, open booking is a strategy; to others it’s a remedy.
At Traxo for Business, we believe that TMCs can effectively address leakage without promoting “Open Booking”. By helping capture the out of program booking data, and providing it to the TMC however they want or need to consume it, we ultimately give the Travel Manager complete, proactive visibility into the bookings they don’t see today. We don’t want you to love open booking; we just want to help you hate it a little bit less!
In connection with this we are forming partnerships with a range of travel technology companies to seamlessly integrate data into the TMC workflow, and provide a complete solution for capturing out-of-program and off-platform booking data. Working with mid-office solutions like Agency Technology and TMC partners like Travel and Transport, we’re hard at work identifying new ways to solve the data challenges that frustrate everyone, from the traveler to the Travel Manager to the agents tasked with supporting their clients. We are extremely excited about these partnerships and what the future holds!
Overall GBTA 2015 was an awesome event, actually probably the best of the 14 that I have attended over the years. It’s the perfect forum for checking out the new technology that will continue to shape and change the travel industry as we know it. The team here at Traxo for Business looks forward to helping define that future. Stay tuned for more to come!
