The Global
Business Travel Association’s annual convention wraps up today at the San Diego
Convention Center. In the exhibit hall, more than 400 companies have been sharing
their newest products and services with the more than 7,000 attendees from around
the world.
Here’s a
roundup of some of the notable news from exhibitors.
- Egencia
Analytics Studio is a new data visualization and analytics platform created for
business travel.
The
system uses visual renderings and customizable widgets to help travel managers understand
their program’s performance and optimize spending for air, hotel, train and car
obligations.
“We live
in a world where data is everywhere, but it’s only useful when you can turn
data into actionable insights,” says Alex Kaluzny, Egencia’s chief technology
officer
“Understanding
the data and using it to make decisions that benefit your business is just the
beginning - we continue to evolve the Egencia Analytics Studio to bring the
power of predictive analytics to our customers.”
Travel
managers can also use the platform to create reports to share with their
organization’s finance, procurement and human resources departments. - Yapta, a provider of airfare and hotel price
tracking services, has created an advanced analytics solution for enterprise
customers.
Yapta TravelAI automatically captures
pricing data on available, booked and contract airfares and hotel rates when
travelers purchase an itinerary, providing procurement teams with full
visibility into prices throughout the travel lifecycle.
“By utilizing advanced analytics and machine
learning to crunch large volumes of travel pricing data across the entire
corporate travel life cycle, our customers can capture powerful insights into
their global travel spend and the pricing trends in the marketplace,” says
James Filsinger, president and CEO of Yapta.
“This is highly actionable pricing
intelligence that can help companies move towards dynamic pricing technology,
rather than negotiating every supplier contract through an RFP.”
Yapta TravelAI is immediately available to customers through an early
adopter program with general availability anticipated in the fourth quarter of this
year. - Traxo, which offers travel data aggregation and itinerary
intelligence, has released its newest corporate travel data management tool.
Traxo Connect for SME is designed for companies with less than $10
million in annual travel spend and/or unmanaged corporate travel programs.
“Many small to medium companies have told us they need better tools to
manage their corporate travel activity, but really don’t have a need for the
full-service solutions typically offered by travel management companies and
don't want to coerce their employees into using a particular booking tool,” says
Traxo founder and CEO Andres Fabris.
“Our Traxo Connect for SME solution gives these companies
best-in-class tools to manage their entire corporate travel spend, in
real time, while still providing their employees the ultimate flexibility to
book wherever it’s most convenient.”
The system includes the Traxo Filter,
which allows companies to access all employee business travel reservations,
whether booked direct on an airline, hotel or rental car site or through any
online travel agency, metasearch site or mobile app.
Fabris says this frees employees to book
as they choose while still ensuring all data is automatically captured for
corporate expense reporting and duty-of-care purposes. - TravelBank, a
travel and expense platform for small- and medium-size businesses, has released its “Book
on Behalf of Another,” or BOBA, feature for desktop.
The new
solution allows travel managers to coordinate multiple calendars to book flight
and hotel stay for team members, manage multiple traveler profiles including frequent
flyer and loyalty program information and access TravelBank’s personal travel
concierge service.
TravelBank says
30% of its customers are using the system to book travel for other people, and
the majority prefer to use TravelBank’s desktop app on the web to do the
bookings. - Corporate parking reservation service
SpotHero for Business is now integrated with BCD Travel’s SolutionSource
technology marketplace and TripSource, its trip management platform.
The partnership means BCD clients can enable
parking expense management, making it easy for their employees to find, book
and save on parking.
“Navigating cities by car while traveling
is difficult enough without having to worry about finding a place to park,” says
Will Pinnell, vice president of digital and product at BCD Travel.
“By bringing SpotHero into our
SolutionSource marketplace and our traveler platform, TripSource, we’re making
the process of finding and reserving a parking space hassle-free for our
travelers."
SpotHero for Business will be available
in the TripSource mobile app in the next phase of development. - SAP Concur has created a
Travel bot on the Slack platform.
The bot makes it easy for colleagues to
coordinate their business travel and to save time by searching and booking
together in Slack.
SAP Concur says 40% of the flights booked
in its system in 2017 had at least two users from the same company on board.
Currently in beta, the bot allows users
to search for and filter flights based on destination, departure and return
dates, fare class, and airline, all within a Slack conversation.
Once flights are selected, the bot auto-populates
saved payment and reward program information from the user’s SAP Concur profile.
Group planning can be done in public,
private or one-on-one Slack channels, and the bot can send itineraries to
Concur Expense.
The company says bot was created based on learning
from the Hello Hipmunk chatbot. SAP Concur acquired Hipmunk in 2016.