While facilitating a trip of a lifetime may sound glamorous the biggest opportunities for online travel start-ups are business to business

Back in January Don Birch, travel industry veteran and founder of Travel Innovation Partners, suggested that the real opportunities for online travel lie in the plumbing. That’s proving true for a number of start-ups that started out with a predominantly B2C focus but are finding that business is brisker in the B2B world. EyeforTravel spoke to three.

The first, Routehappy, started life in 2012 as a metasearch company aimed at delivering the best airline experience to travellers. While many websites at the time allowed you to search by price, Routehappy brought a different dimension – the ‘happiness’ factor – to flight search. Its ‘happiness score’ took into account things like seat type, legroom, seat width, entertainment, AC power points, Wifi, on-time performance records plus airline user review scores.

After two year’s operating in the B2C space, the company has now made the transition to being a software as a service (SAAS) company focused purely on the B2B side of its business. According to Robert Albert, the company’s founder and CEO, soon after launching, airlines and distributors were getting in touch to establish commercial partnerships.

“It became clear that industry had pent up demand for data, content and tools to help them differentiate flight air travel. So we decided it was an even more compelling and useful path to enable the industry, rather than try to compete with it,” he says.

It became clear that industry had pent up demand for data, content and tools to help them differentiate

Robert Albert, founder and CEO, Routehappy

So perhaps a case of: ‘if you can’t beat them join them’.

Still, business has been brisk and Routehappy has already signed two big names – Expedia and Google.

“Google is our latest, and there are more to come. We're actively developing partnerships with the world's airlines and distributors including OTAs, metasearch, global distribution systems and corporate travel firms,” says Albert.

The aim is to provide a new product differentiation platform to help the industry better monetise their product investments and enrich flight shopping for consumers at the same time. What Routehappy’s ‘Happiness Factors’ API means for Google, says Albert, is a robust, global high-quality dataset so that for the first time, flyers can easily pick and choose what product features they will get by flight. 

They reached out to us

Trip planning tool Utrip is another firm that started life in the consumer space. Gilad Berenstein, CEO and founder says that when Utrip was in a public beta they had interest from several travel companies.

“We didn't reach out to them, they reached out to us as they wanted our artificial intelligent trip planning technology on their sites,” he says.

So the company focused on developing the technology for both B2C and B2B segments. The firm launched out of beta in April 2014, and in September had its first B2B client - the Dallas Convention and Visitors Bureau. “So it was really taking advantage of the opportunities before us," Berenstein says.

We didn't reach out to them, they [the industry] reached out to us

Gilad Berenstein, CEO and founder, Utrip

Most recently, the Santa Clara Convention & Visitors Bureau launched the firm’s free travel planning tool for visitors to the city, where the SuperBowl will be held in February next year.

Charlie Osmond, Triptease’s founder and so-called ‘chief tease’ maintains that his company’s aim was always to improve online travel for consumers but also by working closely with hotels.

In order to build a good relationship with hotels, Triptease has moved away from a commission-based model to a flat fee. “We’ve found that’s what hoteliers prefer,” he says.

Triptease has developed an add-on tool for hotel websites, which displays live prices from three OTAs during the booking process. Once a guest searches for date availability, Triptease scans the web for comparable up-to-date prices. The widget reacts to the market and will offer guests a rate match if a cheaper price is found elsewhere.

According to Osmond A/B tests have shown an immediate increase in conversion, higher revenues and reduced exit rates from each hotel’s website. What has been particularly pronounced is the impact on returning visitors, as they progress along the booking funnel. 

Julie Grieve of Lateral City Apartments says since implementing the Triptease price check tool, they have seen a marked increase in direct bookings coming through the website.

“Our booking page exit rate fell by 25% in the first month and we have continued to see more direct bookings month on month,” she says.

Grieve prefers the fixed pricing approach to a commission-based payment model.

“It allows us to better control and plan costs, and keep costs static as we grow. This control is hugely important for small and growing businesses,” she says.