Booking.com for Business was unveiled in early 2015 after the accommodation giant observed that about one in five bookings were for business travel.
In addition, a third of those who were booking were not opting for hotels.
The service offers the same access to inventory for corporations as is also available for leisure customers, but with some additional functionality such as reports and the ability to highlight properties already used by business travelers.
Ripsy Bandourian joined Booking.com from Apple in 2014 and, as vice president of partnerships, she heads up the business travel arm.
PhocusWire caught up with Bandourian to discuss the development of the service since launch.
When you announced the launch of Booking.com for Business around 4.5 years ago, one in five bookings were for business travel. Has this evolved?
Our offering has evolved with the advent of “bleisure” travel, a cross between business and leisure. Many travelers no longer fit cleanly into one box - leisure or business travel.
Today’s culture of aspirational travel combined with technology has inspired the rebirth of corporate travel, giving business travelers a greater sense of freedom and exploration with more options for accommodation types and a myriad of other experiences.
Because of this, we are working to create a more seamless experience for businesses and their travel managers by bringing them enhanced functionality and reporting capabilities designed to meet the specific needs of corporate travel.
Because we know our customers love the ease and simplicity of our core platform, Booking.com for Business remains a free tool for travel managers and assistants that allows booking on behalf of others with no strings attached and no required minimums.
As you have tracked business travel trends generally and behavior from business travelers on the site, how have you developed and adapted functionality for this segment of the market?
As with anything on our site, we test and learn from every piece of technology we deploy as any application must really serve and enhance the customer experience. We’re not experimenting for technology’s sake; we’re working to actively solve a customer problem and remove friction from their experience on our platform.
As such, we have taken the best of what we offer leisure travelers, and combined it with our deep understanding of the needs of travel managers - whether that’s transparency, control, ease of use to book for others and more.
This led us to develop new products as well as adapting existing functionalities to best solve for the needs of business travelers and travel managers. The result is a tool that makes it easier to book on behalf of travelers with a clear visual on travel spend and the ability to view all travelers’ whereabouts in a single interface.
What partnerships in business travel are you most proud of and why?
We have taken a truly platform-led approach, working with existing players in the market as well as new entrants, to build great solutions and create enhanced experiences on Booking.com as well.
Our platform enables our partners to solve their most pressing challenges in the corporate travel space by adapting to our solutions, with little development needed.
This has allowed us to work with some of the biggest global distribution systems (GDSs), travel management companies (TMCs) and online booking engines (OBEs) in the world, as well as a whole range of smaller regional providers.
These partnerships are not only adding value to their existing operations, but helping Booking.com to deliver on our mission to connect travelers with incredible stays all over the world, whether it be for business or leisure travel.
We’re also seeing more and more alternative accommodation partners - of which we now have more than six million listed on our platform - increasingly host business travelers.
I am particularly excited about this segment of growth because as we evolve Booking.com for Business, we are able to help accommodation partners across all segments capture incremental business and provide a quality guest experience - whether they are an extended stay apartment or a hotel.
What are business travel buyers and managers and their travelers telling you they want from Booking.com?
We know travel buyers and managers rely on us to deliver availability. During peak times when most traditional accommodations are fully booked, travel managers know they can turn to our site to find a variety of inventory, breadth in the type of accommodation - an apartment for a longer stay or a boutique hotel for a younger traveler - as well as a myriad of different rates and savings.
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We have built all of our tools for businesses to respond and cater to their needs, whether that is adopting functionality to clarify costs and minimize rogue spend, or ensuring traveler managers can use learnings from reports to update their travel policies.
Personalization is talked about a great deal across both leisure and business segments. What steps has Booking.com for Business taken to create a more personalized experience?
Booking.com is always creating and testing new products that enable our consumers to experience the world seamlessly, whatever device.
It’s not a separate strategy for leisure travelers versus business travelers, it’s just how we work. For example, we can leverage the increasing number of reviews we’re receiving from business travelers and using natural language processing, we can decipher why a hotel or apartment is loved in this context and make better recommendations to other business travelers based on their feedback.
Ongoing advances in AI, machine learning and data science are empowering us to create personalized, frictionless and ultimately enjoyable journeys with our products, and we are excited about the efficiencies this stands to create for Booking.com for Business users in the future.
Chatbots are another interesting development. How has Booking.com for Business been able to put the technology to good use?
Our Booking Assistant chat product is trained on real customer inquiries and guided by our customer service team which means that as our volume and experience with business travelers has expanded, so has our ability to improve our functionality to serve business travelers in our app.
The Booking Assistant is available to all bookings worldwide in 12 languages and dialects, and is currently able to respond to 60% of customer enquiries in English automatically.
We know that business travelers in particular need quick solutions and answers to their questions, perhaps more so than other travelers, and we are working on further expanding our language knowledge base to accommodate all travelers and partners.
What partnerships might we see Booking.com (internally and/or externally) forge in order to create a more seamless experience for business travelers?
We’re constantly looking for new opportunities to partner with innovative brands and remove friction from the business travel experience.
One area I am particularly excited about is payment solutions as this is one area where there have been so many improvements to make things as simple as possible for business travelers.
We have forged partnerships to develop solutions where the traveler doesn’t have to enter any payment information manually and the charges are automatically covered by their company.
Simultaneously, we have empowered travel managers to use itemization to be able to authorize individual charges to ensure compliance with company policies.
Ongoing advances in AI, machine learning and data science are empowering us to create personalized, frictionless and ultimately enjoyable journeys with our products.
Ripsy Bandourian - Booking.com
Ultimately, a key goal is removing the friction from payments for travelers. There is a trend towards VCC (Virtual Credit Card) payments and we are working hard to satisfy travelers’ and travel managers’ needs by partnering with some of the industry’s leading providers.
Our partners that share a vision for a seamless reservation, travel and centralized payment experience are going to be so important as we expand our ability to make payments as simple as possible.
When the “consumerization” of travel was first talked about, the travel management community talked a lot about policy compliance and duty of care. Would you say Booking.com for Business is now more accepted as part of the equation?
From the outset of Booking.com for Business, our goal has been to combine all of the flexibility, ease of use and diversity expected from a leisure travel product with all the varying levels of control, compliance, reporting and duty of care that business demands.
Over time, we have continued to experiment, learn and innovate to support companies and business travelers with enhanced functionality that truly meets the demands of companies and business travelers.
One great example of this is a tool we created to give instant access to a “people locator,” which enables travel managers with an immediate overview of how many employees are currently traveling, their contact details as well as those of the property where they’re staying in case they need to be contacted.
We also know how important things like policy compliance and duty of care are to our partners and travelers, and we continue to innovate and create products and features to support them in this way.
How does Booking.com for Business sit in terms of growing within the overall company. Is it a growth area? Are bookings for a particular type of accommodation increasing from business travelers? Are there areas of accommodation you would like to expand to - extended stay, work/meeting space relocations?
Booking.com for Business is an important part of our business, and we see healthy demand from the corporate segment.
Just one example of an area we’re seeing growth in, as I said before, is business travelers booking alternative accommodation options for their stays - whether that is because they plan to extend their stay for leisure or they just want a kitchen to be able to cook their own meals in after a long day at a conference.
We’re constantly looking for new areas to innovate in, and there is no shortage of areas to expand into. The future of business travel is an exciting one and we’re thrilled to be at the forefront of this transformation.