In the Big Chair - Avi Meir of TravelPerk

Avi Meir, Co-founder & CEO

TravelPerk was founded in 2015 to make corporate travel booking less painful. Co-founder and CEO Avi Meir previously founded Hotel Ninjas before selling it to Booking.com in mid-2014.

TravelPerk is one of a handful of corporate travel startups attracting significant investment. The Barcelona-based company has raised $75 million so far and is scaling up its customer care team and opening new offices in London and Berlin.

You’re a newcomer to the business of business travel - what preconceptions did you have that have been dispelled?

I didn’t have many, because in a way business travel came looking for me. Pretty much my whole career has been based around consumer travel, and of course I was (and still am) a business traveler. And it was this combination of experiences that first introduced me to one of the key trends in business travel, which is a primary reason why TravelPerk is growing so rapidly: Every corporate traveler now wants and expects the same experience that they get when booking leisure travel.

One preconception I did have as a younger man on the outside of the travel industry looking in, was that I thought that travel was a much more tech-led environment, but I found out early on that the use of technology is mostly reactive to tackle problems.

The work we’re doing at TravelPerk is just one example of how we’re now starting to see the business travel industry asking the question: “How can we make this even better?” rather than: “How can we stop this being a problem?”

How is your experience from the leisure travel sector helping you in business travel?

The experience I gained in the consumer industry is everything, because business travelers now expect the experience of booking a corporate trip to compare to booking a vacation.

They want to see all the possible fares and accommodation to tailor their trip, for the best price, and they want a seamless experience on one consistent platform to manage their whole trip, with the assurance that they have real, human customer service at the end of the phone or chat, 24/7. That’s what we offer with TravelPerk.

And the time for this is now, with more of us traveling for work than ever. What’s more, millennials make up more than a third of the workforce now, and they value the power of face-to-face meetings and in-person networking more than previous generations.

I’m a millennial myself (if you go by the strict definition) and I don’t see why my business travel booking and management experience shouldn’t be as easy or exciting as taking a vacation.

A recent study found that nearly 40% of frequent business travelers regularly shop and book directly with suppliers and travel agencies for their trips. Understanding these desires and preferences for business travel is helping us give people what they want, and it’s that which is having an effect on the market.

TravelPerk announced $65 million in two rounds in 2018. Can you provide an update on how the funds are being invested?

We're taking something that’s working extremely well - service, product, traveler experience - and accelerating it on every front, evolving the product, scaling and up-skilling our customer care team to ensure the best support for hundreds of thousands of travelers and focusing on expansion to crucial cities such as London and Berlin, with more to come very soon.

TravelPerk has phenomenal potential, and we’re using these funds to grow into an industry leader.

Other startups in corporate travel are attracting significant funding. Why do you think this is such an attractive segment without saying that corporate travel is broken or decades behind?

Because it’s a huge market being taken care of by solutions not designed for its needs. There are players serving some of this market, but the business travel market is worth $1.3 trillion annually, and there are a lot of customers who are suffering with outdated tools and paying the cost of using multiple, unconnected systems to manage each stage of the trip - booking, reporting, expenses, issue management.

Companies that are using technology to address these issues smartly, and who are building with businesses and their travelers in mind, are rightly attracting attention and funding. I think investors realize business travel is one of the biggest markets that hasn’t been fixed by better technology and products.

Is there room for all these startups in the space?

We’ll see. As I said, the market is huge, so there’s plenty to go around - and strong competition across the sector encourages some of the smartest thinking.

There are different niches in the market, and that’s being reflected in the different approaches taken by providers. Every competitor is slightly different, but personally (and I’m slightly biased) I think our approach of taking ownership over the entire business travel process is the right one. We believe that the winning solution will combine the best self-serve tool with amazing 24/7 support, from real humans.

What are the biggest challenges that TravelPerk currently faces?

The biggest challenge is keeping our culture consistent across a company that sometimes adds 35 people a week. I can’t be in every meeting anymore, which means I put absolute trust in the team I’ve built, and I need to be certain that every new colleague who walks through the door will contribute to that. That's why I still dedicate around 60% of my time to hiring.

It's a challenge to stay on top of it all, but once you start with us, we trust you, so I invest effort into meeting prospective hires. So far, thanks to a great recruiting team, we've been successful in finding some real talent.

That said, when you are aiming to attract and retain the best global talent, ensuring you evolve your culture and focus on people as you scale is critical, so that’s a challenge we’ll never shy away from.

It is often said that corporate travel is hard to crack because buyers are cash poor and time poor. What has been your experience of trying to break into it?

Ultimately, we’re offering a service that answers to that - it takes an average of two minutes to book a trip on our platform, it's completely free to use and companies often see savings of 20% versus prior travel spend.

As a result, we’ve seen enthusiastic adoption: TravelPerk has been in hyper-growth since we launched in 2016, and we now work with more than 1,500 companies globally - many of which are notable scaling tech companies in their own right, such as Adyen, FarFetch, TransferWise and Outfittery.

The biggest challenge is keeping our culture consistent across a company that sometimes adds 35 people a week.

Avi Meir

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As more millennials join the workforce, we’re seeing a trend towards a preference for self-service booking and for unmanaged or serviced apartments over hotels. What people expect from business travel is changing, and the way to break the market is to be one, or 10, steps ahead of that.

Open booking or mandated policy - what’s the best way forward in corporate travel?

I believe you can have the best of both worlds. Create a policy with room and flexibility that relies on trust, but also place limits that give your finance team peace of mind.

Overwhelmingly, organizations that trust their employees see better results. A recent study in the United Kingdom found that more than half of employees considered it to be a major factor in whether they stayed or left a company. But of course, there are always outliers, so why take an unnecessary risk?

Everyone in corporate travel is talking about harnessing data. How do you see it being used to really improve the traveler experience?

Intelligent personalization isn’t just a nice-to-have in the travel world - it’s an essential, and recognizing trends across business travel booked through our platform is how we achieve this.

For example, if 50 people a year travel to one city, and 10 of them benefit from staying at a certain hotel - say they close more deals or have a higher satisfaction score when they get home - then you know you need to suggest to the other 40 that they start to stay there.

Then you can negotiate a cheaper rate with the hotel. That’s a very basic example, but data used properly has terrific potential to make a real difference. We’re seeing examples across almost every industry, why not business travel too?

What area of corporate travel do you personally find most frustrating when on the road?

My wife’s face when I tell her I’m going to be away!

Seriously, I think I have the same frustrations as anyone. The ones that used to really annoy me were the ones that could have been avoided.

Stuff like, “It’s not in our policy to do that,” when you just need to amend a trip at the last minute, or update information, get a refund or book an extra cab.

Every travel provider’s policy should provide safety first, closely followed by traveler experience, so when there are rules in place that don’t deliver that, it gets me frustrated.

That’s the reason we invest so much into building and training our customer care team, because I know firsthand that when something’s gone wrong while you’re on the road, knowing you can rely on 7-star customer service takes away a whole heap of anxiety.

Project forward five years and tell us how you think the corporate travel technology landscape might look.

Tools like TravelPerk will be the norm, and unmanaged travel and travel booked outside of policy will be a thing of the past. I think the celebrated successes in the industry will be those companies that have taken a consumer approach to a business problem, and eased one - or some - of the MANY pain points that still exist in business travel today.

Business travel will suck less, and companies will have greater control, with far-reduced time and cost outlay on their corporate travel budgets.

What was the last book you read?

The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle. An amazing book that explains what makes some teams much more successful than others.