Thank you to everyone who attended this event. If you missed it, a link to the recording and slides for the webinar are available here. Webinar attendees asked so many great questions that we could not get to all of them during the event. Here's a rundown of the key areas where audience members wanted to learn more.
Why Do Travelers Book Off-Channel?
Q: Do you find travelers will not book via your preferred channels since they know they can book outside the system?
A: Travelers book outside of preferred channels for a variety of reasons. They're trying to save the company money, the supplier-direct hotel or flight may be a better fit for their schedule, perhaps they find it more convenient to use their favorite booking app or want loyalty points. In our experience, most employees have good intentions when they go outside of preferred channels and want to either save time or save the company money.
Alternatives
Q: Cathy - Considering you have both travel and expense under your leadership, can't expense reports be used to track out of channel bookings?
A: From Traxo's perspective, expense data is insufficient. Since expenses are almost always submitted after the trip is over, that data comes in too late to be actionable, and doesn't help in providing duty of care or re-shopping activities. Also, expense data lacks important details that can greatly enhance overall program analysis and supplier decisions. With Traxo FILTER, bookings are captured in real-time as they're booked and with deep detail.
How Traxo Works
Q: You mentioned that you are closing the loop of service by bringing off grid back to service and support and I would like to better understand that process and TMC involvement.
A: Traxo CONNECT captures data about off-channel bookings, including itinerary and cost detail, which can be shared with a company's TMC and other service providers. The type of service and support that the TMC chooses to offer its clients is up to them; Traxo simply facilitates sharing the data so it can be actioned as desired by the corporate client and its managed travel partners.
Q: Does Traxo work the same with flights?
A: The Traxo CONNECT platform supports ALL types of travel segments purchased from suppliers, OTAs, and even TMCs. Traxo FILTER captures hotels, flights, car rentals, rail, and even shared economy services like Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, and MyTaxi.
Q: What about non GDS hotels for Traxo? Can those be captured?
A: Traxo FILTER can capture bookings no matter the source. Given this, some customers like that Traxo CONNECT can be their single source of truth to view and analyze all of their GDS bookings as well non-GDS and supplier-direct bookings.
Q: Where do you 'filter' from? How do you identify which company someone is working for?
A: We provide each Traxo CONNECT customer with a unique mailbox for their email server to forward their company's booking emails identified by Traxo FILTER. Because data is controlled at the company level, it's kept securely within its own environment. You can learn more about Traxo's data security and privacy handling here.
Q: Is company e-mail the only identifier that can be used to capture a booking?
A: Traxo FILTER works with your company's email server, so it picks up bookings employees make using their work email address.
Q: How are you going to capture email confirmations that are not sent to a business email via the company server? I would think many travelers use personal e-mail addresses when booking direct on vendor sites.
A: Traxo CONNECT includes company-specific mailboxes (e.g., CorpTravel@YourCompany.com) for employees to forward bookings that were made using a personal email address.
Q: How does Traxo distinguish between a business and leisure reservation? If it cannot, how do you overcome this?
A: Many air, car and hotel companies are already supporting travelers having different personas. For example, Booking.com for Business, Uber and others enable travelers to choose if their booking is for leisure or work. Depending on the selection, they'll will send the confirmation message to a different email address. We see this as becoming a new standard of enabling travelers to self-select if their booking is leisure vs. business purposes.
Q: Our managed travel program is mandatory, but we allow direct bookings for conference rate hotels. I capture the spend from Concur Expense Reports. Would this discussion help me in anyway? I'm trying to build our hotel program, but the chains seem to want more spend than I have to partner with us. What is your advice?
A: Traxo CONNECT can absolutely support this -- with Traxo FILTER, those conference and hotel-direct bookings are detected automatically as they're booked. This means you would see the data in real time, instead of having to wait until the expense report is submitted. Traxo can then share that data immediately with your duty of care provider, TMC, and even Concur Expense. A trial of Traxo CONNECT can quantify this activity before making any major changes to your program.
Q: I have high compliance in the Americas but low compliance in APAC. What are the tips and tricks for APAC when majority of their hotels are not in the GDS?
A: Traxo CONNECT can support your APAC volume with Traxo FILTER. This will enable bookings to be captured as they booked. As long as your employees use their work email address to make their bookings, Traxo FILTER will capture the data and make it available to you in our web dashboard. We can also send it on to the Traxo MARKETPLACE of partners in duty of care, expense management, TMCs, and TRIPBAM.
Service Availability
There were some questions about the geographic availability of the services and support for hotels around the world.
A: Traxo CONNECT is available globally and can work with TMC partners around the world today.
Using Your Corporate Booking Data In More Places
Q: How do offline reservations get to the International SOS travel tracker if using Traxo?
A: Traxo already works with the largest companies in duty of care including International SOS. Once your bookings are automatically captured by Traxo FILTER, we do the rest of the work and forward the data immediately to your trusted service providers. This integration can be implemented as part of the Traxo CONNECT setup process.
Q: Currently we have the agency review all offers from TRIPBAM. For the off grid through Traxo, will that be the traveler now?
A: Traxo CONNECT provides the hotel booking data to TRIPBAM and TRIPBAM processes them the same way as your agency bookings. You can also choose to have that data shared with your agency so they can perform that same review function for you or it can be flagged for your travel manager or other admin to review.
Q: Does Traxo work with other OBT's outside of Concur?
A: Today, Traxo FILTER can automatically detect bookings made with all major OBTs including Concur, GetThere, and Egencia. We can add any others as needed.
Q: Is the service available through any TMCs?
A: Yes. Traxo CONNECT serves as a complement to a corporate client's TMC and is working to establish formal relationships with more TMCs.
Setting Up Traxo CONNECT & Traxo FILTER
Q: How do I contact someone w/in Traxo to discuss their product in depth? What is the implementation timeline for a domestic based company?
A: Our typical implementation timeline is less than 1 week to cover setup and travel manager training on our tools. Visit traxo.com/connect for more information or to schedule a demo.
Q: How easy is it to add e-mail domains for companies with constant acquisitions with Traxo?
A: Implementing Traxo FILTER the first time takes about 20 minutes. Depending on how your company's email services are set up, adding more email domains may just take a few minutes. At most, though, a new instance of Traxo FILTER would be required for each email domain. Traxo regularly works with IT teams on Traxo FILTER implementations and would work with your team to design the optimal approach for quick and easy management.
Q: Can we receive the data from Traxo without sending to TRIPBAM for reshop?
A: Yes. The Traxo CONNECT platform is the hub for your off-channel (and even on-channel) corporate travel data. We view it as YOUR booking data so we can route it wherever you want to send it through our partners in the Traxo MARKETPLACE. Visit traxo.com/connect for more information.
Pricing
Q: What are the costs of this program?
A: The Traxo CONNECT platform costs $1,000 USD per month plus the cost of transactions. Transactions start at $1 each and get cheaper with higher volume. There is no cost to send your data to partners like TRIPBAM, your duty of care provider, or any other member of the Traxo MARKETPLACE. View complete pricing details on the pricing page.
Q: For Traxo, is "per transaction" for one itinerary (hotel, car, flight) or is the "transaction" for each of those?
A: We keep it simple. A transaction is an email delivered to Traxo and successfully processed. No matter how many segments it contains, we record it as one transaction.
Q: How do i get in touch with you in future?
A: Contact us and request a demo of Traxo CONNECT.
Thank you again to Steve from TRIPBAM, Cathy from ITW, and everyone that attended the webinar. As one more reminder, the recording and slides for the webinar are available here.
