How to use algorithms to democratise corporate travel and make it more personal

Smart algorithms that present travellers with real-time options to finalise their itineraries are emerging as backbone of travel start-ups but what’s the secret?

Finding a viable niche in the popular trip planning space is a challenge. Rocketrip, which promises to take the hassle out of corporate trip planning, believes that it has done this in a segment where travel policies don’t make sense. “A policy limit of $500 for a domestic round trip flight? For when? To where? In what season? Static policies just don’t work,” says Daniel Ruch, founder and CEO, Rocketrip.

 

Using algorithms Rocketrip is aiming to differentiate by blending a company’s travel policy with the pricing of inventory from the marketplace. It does this by considering high level guidelines – say non-stop vs. connecting, star ratings for hotels preferred and so on. This is the first input into the algorithm, followed by pricing and availability in real time. From here, the so-called ‘secret sauce’ of proprietary technology comes in and paves way for a personalised budget.

 

Part of the process is understanding the behaviour of your customer which is the focus of Ruch’s interview with EyeforTravel’s Ritesh Gupta.

 

EFT: How do you go about analysing the behaviour of a corporate traveller?

 

DR: At Rocketrip, our customers provide historical travel spending data such as average cost of flights, hotels, car rentals as well as advanced purchase information. We analyse this data to create what we call ‘scorecards’ that we can use to track our progress as we ramp up. Within a few months we demonstrate savings based on like-for-like comparisons with their existing metrics. Since employees earn rewards for reducing their travel spend, we also track the reasons for savings, and this is where things get very exciting.

 

EFT: Can you cite an example?

 

DR: For example, we can tell a company that their average cost per flight went down by X because the occurrence of connecting flights went up by Y as a direct result of the Rocketrip Rewards Platform. We’ve also seen dramatic shifts in activities such as advanced purchase of airfare and employees staying with friends instead of staying in expensive hotel rooms. Using these results, it is very easy to demonstrate the power of the Rocketrip platform.

 

EFT: Getting the choice right for corporate travellers is a tough business. What are the major challenges?

 

DR: One of the tenets of our business is the democratisation of business travel. As such, we don’t optimise choice - we leave this entirely up to the employee. There is a reason ‘non-compliance’ exists in the business travel industry. It is a function of how the industry works - based on contractual relationships that vendors have with websites, travellers will see different prices on different sites all the time. Forcing a user into a single fulfillment platform has two adverse effects.

 

EFT: Can you elaborate on this a bit?  

 

DR: First, it eliminates freedom of choice. Second, it prevents employees from finding those cheaper rates they would otherwise book. Often, because employees can find cheaper rates on their preferred websites, they opt to ignore their company’s mandated travel platform and instead book travel outside of the mandated channel. At Rocketrip, we don’t discourage this behaviour.

 

EFT: Considering the multi-channel, multi-device shopping environment, what is the impact on the corporate travel segment?

 

DR: Everybody talks about this, but we don’t see it yet. Over 95% of travel behaviour we see is purchased sitting in front of a computer. Mobile devices are certainly prevalent regarding travel management - that is, accessing an itinerary, retrieving a boarding pass and so on but booking travel still happens the ‘old fashioned’ Internet way. Having said that, a screen is a screen, and Rocketrip functions well on all of them.

 

EFT: How would you define personalisation in the corporate travel segment and what would an offer look like?

 

DR: On the Rocketrip platform employees earn points for booking cost effective travel. What that means is that we see their preferences, and we can customise the platform to their behaviour. In other words, if Julia books travel with United, we see that. And if she books a hotel with Starwood, we see that too. So the next time she uses the platform to get a budget for a flight and a hotel, we can provide a deep-link to United and Starwood, personalising the experience and making her experience a bit more delightful.

 

EFT: How are you using big data, analytics and so on?

 

DR: We use the data we collect from the platform to look at employee behaviour and how they respond to the budgets set for them. If they beat the budget, how did they beat it and by how much? For example, a hotel budget is $250 per night, and they decided to spend $0 and stay with a friend. That’s great behaviour, so how can we drive increased frequency of that behaviour. That’s what we’re all about at the end of the day.

 

EFT: Can you share the sort of reporting capabilities that Rocketrip provides for real-time analysis of travel spend and behavior?

 

DR: Our customers see everything - how much they’re spending, how much they’re saving, and why, by each travel mode, in real time. We also provide some of the metrics that larger travel management companies provide, such as vendor spend analytics and employee hot spotting – these are problem areas that require attention.

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