Shifting
business travel demands, the fast-growing role of advanced technologies such as
artificial intelligence (AI) and the need to deliver personalized service in an
automated way are changing the nature of travel management companies (TMCs).
Traditional
TMCs are discovering that, unless they move fast in response to newer entrants who
are not encumbered by legacy systems, they risk becoming irrelevant. A hybrid
approach combining technology and tradition is coming to the fore.
Trip.Biz, the business travel brand of Trip.com Group, is growing fast by exceeding
corporate expectations of what an online TMC coupled with high levels of
service can do.
Trip.Biz is a leading TMC in Asia Pacific,
supporting 15,000 multinational corporations and 1 million small- and
medium-sized enterprises worldwide.
At the company’s recent
Airline Global Conference in Amsterdam, Phocuswire sat down with Dr. Tao Song, Trip.Biz’s CEO, to talk about the strategy for the
TMC.
The conversation has been edited for
clarity and brevity.
Many corporations want
to work with the long-standing and familiar TMC names they know. What attracts
companies to you as clients?
First, we build on top
of our online travel agency, Trip.com, so this enables us to have the richest content.
Also, the technology will make that content available online for shopping,
canceling and rescheduling. The automation ratio for us is much higher compared
to other TMCs. This significantly reduces the cost of our service. Self-service
is the most popular mode for many of our clients and covers at least 97% of our
total transactions. Some other TMCs cannot achieve 50% self-service. A lot of
those bookings will go through travel counsultants and the cost increases.
Do you work closely
with finance managers to make sure your platform works for them as well as
travelers?
Trip.Biz works within
client workflows. We have a good relationships with stakeholders within client companies,
including the head of the finance department and operations. For example, electronic
invoices are popular, and we will collect and organize these throughout the
transaction, sorting them and bundling them together, before shipping them to
the finance department. This significantly reduces their workload.
How are you helping travel
managers reduce leakage?
Online booking tools have
a major limitation: limited online content. For example, if you want to book a
flight in Southeast Asia, which may be operated by a low-cost carrier or a domestic
carrier, they may not be available in some global distribution systems (GDSs) and
you will not find them in other online booking tools. You can try to call, and
they will just ask you to book on the airline website or use an OTA and do a manual
reimbursement process. After a few attempts, users feel frustrated and give up.
No wonder the traveler asks, ‘Why don’t I just stop using OBT.’ We have that
rich content.
Your growth has been
driven by SMEs who often do not manage their travel. Why do they choose you?
We're a good SME platform.
It's a totally different segment compared to big enterprise. For SMEs, many of
them are price sensitive, and they may not afford high service fees. Meanwhile,
the requirements for system integration with them is limited, and this
significantly reduces implementation cost. We provide simplified options.
Do clients transition
to the enterprise solution when they grow?
We categorize clients
according to size—MNC (multinational corporations), large enterprises and SMEs—but
we realize that for many clients, they may not be able to afford or want to pay
higher service fees for customization. For example, some manufacturers are so
critical on pricing, they are often reluctant to upgrade to enterprise
solutions. We have some big clients working with SME solutions.
Can platforms like
Trip.Biz really cater for high-touch clients?
We have a very
sophisticated system, which supports very flexible policy settings. For our
service teams, there are different service level agreements for different
clients. If you are a client who has a really critical need on response time
and need multi language support around the world, we can support you.
Trip.Biz acquired United
Kingdom-based TMC Key Travel in September. What is your strategy for growth?
We are growing rapidly in Asia
Pacific—especially Singapore and Japan—and through Key Travel we've expanded
into Europe, bringing our global total to more than 30 markets. Localization is critical to our expansion. It
takes time to build a TMC from scratch. We need partners to speed up our learning
curve in new regions. Key Travel is a leading TMC in the NGO and academic areas,
and they are a traditional TMC. We want to see how our technology, our platform
and our automated operation will make legacy TMCs more efficient and help them to
grow fast. One thing we have
learned is that legacy TMCs rely on many manual operations and we will leverage
the technology from our platform and this requires a lot of trust and
collaboration.
How is Trip.Biz going
to benefit from AI?
We are investing heavily
in AI. In addition to the LLMs and agentic infrastructure built by the Trip.com
group, Trip.Biz has built an agent with a simplified online booking within the
chatbot. For management, we have a compliance agent which will check for fraud
and policy compliance.
We are also working on
an agent for smart approval. A lot of our clients have a requirement for pre-approval.
Our data shows it can take more than 30 minutes waiting for your boss to approve,
during which the price may change and you have to start again. The agent takes into
consideration historic data, the travel policy and then decide whether this is
a low-risk travel request. If it is, we will auto-approve it immediately.
Our goal for this year
to is to make a smart approval assistant to solve at least 50% of those kinds
of request automatically with an accuracy rate of over 99.95%. If our agent
approves a request by mistake, if this is fraud, or it is in violation of
policy, we are willing to cover the cost. It is about building trust.
How else do you see
business trip booking changing?
With AI we are
improving our integration with other B2B solutions, including expense
management, office automation and other corporate platforms.
In two years, you will
be able to create a trip on your calendar. You have an event on your calendar
and then let the agent create the request: getting the budget, seeking approval
and recommending flights and hotels for your next business event. Eventually
all the traditional service providers may just the run in the background as agents.
You will not notice those service providers working together.
What are the
priorities for Trip.Biz in the near future?
Technology, including
AI, will be our priority. We want to make business travel more efficient and
affordable and with a balance between cost, efficiency and quality.
Reputation is very
important. Within Asia, we have built a solid level of trust and reputation,
and we are looking to foster even deeper collaborations with our partners and
clients. Our aspiration is to become a leading TMC, and we've seen strong
interest from our clients to expand our services into other regions.