STARTUP STAGE: Ardor Travels is travel and expense management for SMEs

Ardor Travels

Ardor Travels has been in development for about 18 months and just launched its subscription-based travel management platform last Tuesday.

The platform is intended for small- to mid-size businesses and offers a unified system for business travel and expense management.

What is your 30-second pitch to investors?

Imagine having everything you need - and more - for small- to mid-size business travel like hotel, air and car bookings and reporting and expense management at your fingertips for the best prices available. Let me introduce you to Ardor Travels – the next generation of business travel and expense management technology. This all-in-one platform has a mission to reduce cost and maximize savings all while enhancing the traveler experience and streamlining organizational efficiency.

Ardor’s multilingual booking engine accepts multiple currencies and offers real-time reporting, travel desk functionality, the ability to book for a colleague and a process for management approval.

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your start-up.

Traveling for business is a complete pain. It’s hard on team members: some are crew-based businesses and workers that need to be away from home, often on a regular basis. It’s also expensive for organizations. Costs add up. But here are the facts: Many businesses need to be on the road for business. Zoom and Teams calls only go so far – and right now we are at the edge. Real connections and long-standing relationships are made face-to-face. Employees make sacrifices being away from home, family and their personal lives.

Ardor has the tools and technology to make business travel easier and more effective for both employees and the company. Ardor provides companies tools to simplify the process as well as access to personal and family travel at discounts. Ardor Travels is serving this community and capturing members that gain great benefits throughout the journey.

Our subscription-based business model is simple. Provide great savings, on a wide variety of travel options. And make it easy and affordable to set up and customize the platform for each company and traveler. These are the pillars of our business. 

On top of this we have layered in: 

• Access from any device including mobile app downloads from Apple (iOS) and Google (Android)
• Easy installation, set up and customization through your own mid-office
• An admin portal for access to a very robust mid-office
• Affordable pricing for members
• Options for “buy now pay later”
• Options for multiple languages and currencies
• The ability to make bookings at restaurants, tours and attractions and golf courses - coming soon
• Accrue loyalty points (Ardor Coin)
• An influencer code that can be used by family or friends and will give you additional loyalty points
• Excellent customer care

Give us your SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis of the company.

• Strengths
  • Privately owned, equity-backed
  • Lower costs and gain better insights through one integrated platform giving you advanced workflows, detailed reporting and AI-powered automation tools within our booking software
  • Real-time dynamic pricing is coupled with manager approval functionality and the power to download detailed reports instantly
  • The widest choice of flights and hotels across tiers and locations - our curated inventory is designed to exceed the needs of business travelers with an unrivaled personalized booking experience
  • A completely integrated platform that has been built from the ground up to dominate this space 
  • Wholesale rates that are not available to the public. We estimate savings between 25 to 45% off most bookings
  • Easy to install - we can get you up and running in minutes  
  • Cost to start is significantly less than legacy players
  • Detailed reporting that will help you manage travel expenses in real time
• Weaknesses
  • Limited brand awareness for our product
  • Currently in early adopter phase roll-out
• Opportunities
  • As business travel makes a comeback, Ardor is positioned to help small- to mid-size businesses get back to traveling for business 
  • To gain word of mouth awareness by serving this segment of the market 
  • The ability to partner with organizations for grassroots marketing opportunities
  • The ability to offer personal travel and experiences
  • The ability to expand to include leisure travel 
  • Customer loyalty
  • Influencer/friends code 
• Threats
  • COVID-19 will continue to be, if not a threat, a major wildcard that could continually disrupt the travel space
  • Legacy players decide to change their pricing model as a way to limit Ardor growth 

What are the travel pain points you are trying to alleviate from both the customer and the industry perspective?

The travel pain points we alleviate include delivering lower travel costs overall by offering the best rates, multilingual booking, the widest selection of inventory from hotel, airline and car suppliers, on-the-go booking from any device including mobile apps, advanced workflows, expense management, detailed reporting and AI-powered automation tools.

The industry perspective: Travel is expensive, and it’s a pain for those that must be on the road. It can also be a huge time hassle for those that continually need to make bookings, track and manage expenses and provide reimbursement checks. Our target audience runs lean. They need to watch every dollar going out the door and look for tools to help make them more productive. It takes time and time is money. Ardor removes this pain. Our platform is perfectly designed for an individual that needs to be on the road and is looking for the best way to make a booking. 

Additionally, our system allows organizations up-to-the-minute reporting so they will be able to track in real time the investment they are making by having team members on the road. 

Finally, Ardor Travels has been designed so once onboarding and training is complete all the updates and changes can be done internally by anyone in the organization. There’s no need for technical support although the Ardor Customer Success team is available to help at any time.

The customer perspective: It’s convenient – bookings can be done on a laptop, anywhere you have access to the internet or mobile phone via the Ardor app. 

It’s customizable – the Ardor system allows each user to create the travel preferences around his or her likes and that fit within the company’s guidelines. For example: Traveler A wants to only fly Delta and stay in Hilton properties. Traveler B wants only Southwest and wants to stay at Marriott properties. If these preferences fit within the guidelines established by the business, these preferences can easily be established. This cuts down on the booking and reservation time. And makes the travel experience more enjoyable for the traveler. 

It’s efficient – if a travel preference is selected by a team member that falls outside of the company's guidelines this will trigger a need for approval from the manager automatically. At that point the manager can see the reason why the traveler is attempting to book outside the guidelines and can see/review options available and decide to either accept the booking request or suggest the traveler make another available choice. This eliminates surprises and a lot of back and forth. Additionally, it engages the employee to make the best possible decision.

Finally when it comes to expense reimbursement it dramatically speeds up the process. In so many cases expense reporting happens once the team member is off the road. If that team member is on the road for one or two weeks out of the month, the receipts add up. Then there’s finding the time to get the form in and if there are any questions on the forms, it can take a while before the check has been processed. With Ardor, as soon as a receipt is received, the team member can snap a picture, or download the receipt, tag the expense and upload for manager approval. As soon as the team member is off the road and all receipts are in, the check can be cut. 

So you've got the product, now how will you get lots of customers?

The Ardor Travels app is easy to download, extremely user-friendly and fully customizable, perfect for our target audience We will increase our customer reach by sharing engaging, thought-provoking content that highlights the cornerstones of Ardor Travels as a company, our technology and capabilities and advances the positive reputation and awareness of Ardor Travels as a key leader and innovator and disruptor in the space.

Ardor has been specifically designed for small- to mid-size businesses, that’s the audience we serve. And we believe by offering a product that over-delivers we can build word of mouth with that community. 

As we grow our member community, the Ardor member will benefit by add-on ancillary connections to access all kinds of wonderful inventory on a global basis while earning loyalty rewards by accessing, utilizing, booking and referring the platform to others.

To help fuel our word-of-mouth growth we are using an account-based marketing approach focusing initially on those businesses that must be on the road or are choosing to have team members be on the road. With this group it’s critical we establish trust. Trust that Ardor can deliver on our promises. We will do this by providing relevant and helpful content through our own channels and through social platforms primarily LinkedIn. 

We believe PR will be a key element to building trust by securing placements in key publications and then utilizing the placements to help drive traffic and trial. 

Tell us what process you've gone through to establish a genuine need for your company and the size of the addressable market.

The global business travel market was valued at $695.9 billion in 2020, and is expected to reach $2,001.1 billion by 2028, growing at a CAGR of 13.2% from 2021 to 2028. Business travel is a division of regular tourism in which people travel for a business-oriented purpose. Ardor members will also be tapping into the tremendous leisure travel industry market with the many links we’ll be providing. 

How and when will you make money?

We will monetize and build value in the business through brand awareness, subscriber adoption and growth, bookings growth and revenue and adding ancillary products that bring added value to our member base that can also be monetized. Example: Insure my trip.

What are the backgrounds and previous achievements of the founding team?

Our team has scaled companies and delivered complex projects. We have vast travel, hospitality and technology backgrounds, with strong e-commerce, supply chain and operations experience. Our internal technical developers, architects and business analysts with AI and machine learning backgrounds are very experienced in airline, hotel and travel with an in-depth knowledge of how the industry works.

How have you addressed diversity and inclusion within your business?

We’re a U.S.-based global company. We have a Spanish version of our platform and Spanish speaking employees and customers. Our team is composed of senior members that are women and customer success representatives from South America that are bilingual. Our technical team has many members from India and we have offices in Dubai, Mumbai and New Delhi.

What's been the most difficult part of founding the business so far?

The amount of hours, long days and intensity of developing a robust technical platform from scratch. Of course the COVID environment, but we tried to make it a positive by adding more features and functionality that were planned for later development. And finding good sales/business developers. We’re investing big time in influencer marketing links to our platform along with developing a loyalty program that will drive referrals. 

Generally, travel startups face a fairly tough time making an impact - so why are you going to be one of the lucky ones? 

At Ardor, we don’t believe in luck - the term Ardor stands for: ar·dor, /ˈärdər/, noun meaning enthusiasm or passion. “They felt the stirrings of revolutionary ardor.” Similar: passion, avidity, fervor, zeal, wholeheartedness, eagerness.

We have and will continue to pour energies and work hard to make the best platform on the market and the world a better place in doing so.

Ardor Travels is the business travel solution the post-pandemic world needs. Bringing together new age insurances, duty of care, radical cost savings all while making travel enjoyable again. We are committed to never-ending innovative technology, products and expenses, as well as an all-in-one smart platform for travel expense management and reporting that is customizable for the consumer.

We do not believe this market is being properly serviced. Legacy players are focused on large corporations and ongoing contracts. They are not built to help smaller businesses that need to travel.

We have specifically designed our platform for a post-pandemic world – to reduce costs, improve the entire process from booking to expense reimbursement. The time to get up and running on our platform is minimal and updates and modifications to travel preferences can all be done in-house without requiring technical resource intervention.

A year from now, what state do you think your start-up will be in?

Phase one roll-out stage North America, LATAM and South America and just entering next phase with Asia Pacific and Europe roll-out.

What is your endgame? (Going public, acquisition, growing and staying private, etc.)

Our ultimate endgame is global growth within a wide range of industries and to be the premier B2B corporate travel brand while nurturing the B2C experience. This will provide options for our owners and investors: acquisition, new products, regional spinoffs or an outright exit.