Rocketrip, a website that gives a company's employees monetary rewards for cutting costs on business travel, is optimising itself for a global audience.
The New York startup challenges employees to stay within corporate travel policies. Employees get a share of the savings when they book under budget.
For example, an employee who saves $200 on travel would earn enough reward points for $100 worth of merchandise from well-known retailers such as Amazon, Best Buy, Bloomingdales, and J Crew.
Rewards options vary globally. In Europe, examples include Marks & Spencer, Bol.com, Buch.de, and iTunes.
The startup claims that its customers, including the companies Opower, ShareThis, and Elite SEM, have saved an average of $238 per trip during the first three months of 2015.
Global travel can make arrival times, multi-destination hotel booking and currency conversion tricky. To make its trip-planning tools more friendly for international and multi-stop itineraries, Rocketrip has rolled out a few fixes:
- Employees can now sort flights by ones that will arrive by a specific time, as an alternative to sorting by departure time.
- Users can now generate a budget in any of 165 currencies.
- The site now enables multi-hotel bookings, something it says its competitors can't.
The company has raised $6.2 million to date from received funding from Canaan Partners, Genacast Ventures, Crunchfund, Y Combinator, and others.
Startup pitch: Rocketrip wants to remove travel management friction