STARTUP STAGE: Trip Approve wants to streamline business travel management

Trip Approve

Trip Approve is a subscription service for companies to access low rates, understand where they employees are, manage spending and ensure compliance to policies and procedures. 

Founded in May by a 20-year travel veteran, Trip Approve is currently self-funded and working to attract new customers so it can generate more revenue as business travel resumes.

What is your 30-second pitch to investors?

What’s holding organizations back from shopping the open market for travel services is their ability to track the whereabouts of their travelers, manage travel expenditure and ensure compliance to policy and procedures. We have built a travel management platform that thrives in the open market while providing organizations the control they need to independently manage and locate travelers, reduce costs and manage their travel programs more efficiently. 

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup. 

Business - We are a self-funded organization, and we need to make money to exist. We run a very lean organization, and any profits we generate from the business are reinvested back into the development of our technology for the betterment of our customers. The entire team sits within a startup community based in Melbourne (Stone and Chalk) when we are not in a COVID-enforced shutdown. We use the plentiful resources and ideas available through the community to extend our network and contacts to pursue opportunities for the business.

Technology - We are an open-source house. Python and Vue.js are the core languages used within our development stack and our infrastructure sits within AWS. Simple, clean and functional workflows are the major considerations when we are planning and developing our user interface. The customer experience is everything - if we need to provide training so people can use our products then we have developed a lemon. A lot of our design principles are driven by what the major tech companies are doing in the market, therefore, we adopt a lot of their ideas into our products and services. 

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

• Strengths - The company CEO and founder (Simon Crunden) started out booking travel at Flight Centre and ended up as senior executive at HRG running its Australian client management team. For the past 12 years, he has been consulting with large government, education and corporate organizations helping them implement better travel management programs. His knowledge of the corporate travel from a seller’s and buyer’s perspective is critical to the development of platforms that work for our customers. All of the developers within the team are full stack and have the ability to switch from front and back end seamlessly. Being a small team, they communicate well, ask lots of questions (before they stuff something up), come up with ideas on how to do things better and help each other to solve problems. We develop platforms from the ground up so we have total control of how the code works. We have unbelievable access to our customers and most of them are intricately involved in the design of the concepts that drives the development of our platforms. We have access to a great network through Stone and Chalk (and they do everything within their power to help us succeed). 
• Weaknesses - We are a small team so our resources are limited (that said, we have built a groundbreaking travel planning and approval platform within a matter of months). We don't have the marketing budgets (or millions of dollars in investment) of many of our competitors. We are still building our business network, which we need to help us grow the business. It will take time to get the people we need to make this happen. 
• Opportunities - We are not building a platform that funnels people into a GDS-driven booking platform. We are truly independent of any major travel management company platform, so once a traveler has their trip approved, they can book wherever they need to in order to complete their travel in the most efficient and effective way.
• Threats - There will be people that will replicate what we do and talk up a good story and get people to invest millions of dollars into the development of a similar platform. Partnering with the wrong people (i.e. people that don’t understand what we are doing). 

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

• Access to the best deals - GDS is an expensive way for suppliers to distribute their products and services. The internet has provided suppliers with a low-cost method to allow customers to browse and book their products and services. Therefore, more often than not, customers will be able to source cheaper products and services online (direct or through an aggregator) than through their travel management company. This creates a tension between the customer and the travel management company as travelers cannot book travel products and services for rates that are equal to or lower than what they can buy online. This is the number one issue for most organizations, “How come I can get a better deal online?” Within Trip Approve, the traveler creates a trip plan, inclusive of destinations and travel dates and a budget. The data the customer needs to manage traveler risk, financial considerations, policy and procedures is controlled by the customer, therefore, once approved, the traveler can make the booking wherever they are able to find the best deal wherever that happens to be (i.e. travel management company, Booking.com, Expedia, Airbnb, etc.). 
• Understand where their people are - The industry standard for tracking people is to link the trip to the closest airport within the travel itinerary. This is okay if the traveler is staying within proximity of the destination they are travelling to, or indeed, catching a flight to get to the destination. However, most people don’t just travel to an airport. Take the following itinerary as an example: August 24, Melbourne to Milan (flight); August 27, Milan to Zurich (rail); September 2, Zurich to Paris (rail); September 6, Paris to London (rail); September 10, London to Cambridge (rail); September 20, Cambridge to London (rail) to Melbourne (flight). A travel management company would be able to tell me the traveler flew to Milan on August 24 and out of London on September 20 but wouldn’t have any details on the rest of the itinerary. Trip Approve captures all of this information in the trip plan created by the traveler, so if there is an issue, the customer can track where the traveler is with a reasonable degree of accuracy. 
• Manage expenditure - A traveler creates a budget with every trip plan they create within the platform. This provides the organization with a guide to the costs associated with the trip which then shows as a commitment against the traveler’s travel budget. When the traveler starts to purchase their flights, accommodation etc., the traveler associates the expense to the trip budget giving them a running update on how much they have spent to date. We have found this to be a great way for travelers to manage their expenditure and ensure they don’t go over their approved budget. Furthermore, the reporting linked to the application provides stakeholders (managers) up-to-the-minute reporting on the organization’s travel finances as budgets are created and expenses submitted. 
• Compliance to policy and procedures - We configure the system to allow organizations to manage elements within their policy. For example, if a traveler requests to travel business class on a flight, the approver has the ability to approve (or decline) this request before the airfare is purchased. This is in contrast to reporting business class travel after the journey has been completed (which is the industry standard). Furthermore, Trip Approve has functionality to track private travel, which in some countries carries a tax liability to the organization that they want to avoid at all costs. We can also monitor travel to high risk destinations, enforce travelers to enter information critical to the management of the trip and the safety of the individual, for example, emergency contact details, host and in country contact details and accommodation details (especially important as statistically we know 22% over overnight stays are booked outside the preferred travel management company). 

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

We are running campaigns through social media to create awareness of Trip Approve. We also have excellent networks within the government and education sectors within Australia and New Zealand and we are starting campaigns in markets including the United Kingdom. Furthermore, we have over 2,500 organizations through our sister company Travel Analytics that we can activate at any time through our travel management company channels. Realistically it will take time for us to get the traction we need, but we are well on the way to do this. The biggest challenge for us is getting people to understand that we are not a booking tool, and we are not looking to get into this space. There are literally thousands of options for people to book travel, and we don’t need to add to an already cluttered market. However, if people want the ability to book the open market, then we have the platform that allows them to do this. 

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

Over the past 12 years Simon has worked for large companies, state and federal government and the education sector helping them to manage their travel more efficiently. His experience is that most organizations have a limited understanding of how to manage and reduce their travel costs. They spend thousands implementing onerous administrative processes, poorly designed supplier programs, monitoring and compliance systems that result in little or no reduction in costs and high levels of dissatisfaction among users. There are six fundamentals to managing travel: planning, approval, booking, undertaking travel, expenditure, finalization and reporting

Most organizations focus on the booking process and perhaps the expenditure part of the process but never will they focus on all of these parts at once. We look at it differently, we focus on everything but the booking process, therefore, if an organization uses Trip Approve to streamline the planning, approval, traveler management (risk), expense and finalization process then they are going to provide their people a great travel management experience. 

How and when will you make money?

Subscription services. Our pricing starts at $2.50 per active profile and we make our money from people using the application. Therefore, we need to develop a platform that people want to use, and this is critical to our success. While there is a significant drop in travel at the moment, we are focusing on getting customers signed up to the application and our revenues will increase as people start to travel again. Furthermore, we don’t just rely on flights and people are still moving around, just not always on aircraft (as we can track road trips as easily as we can trips involving flights). 

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

Simon Crunden (founder and CEO) has been in the travel industry for more than 20 years. He started out with Flight Centre booking tropical holidays for people desperate to get away from a Melbourne winter. In a matter of a few years, Simon moved into a sales role with Flight Centre corporate division and was headhunted into a role at BTI where he ran a team of client managers across Australia. After spending too much time away from a small family, Simon quit and started a consulting company providing advice to large corporate, government and university sector organizations on how to set up travel programs. In 2015, Simon founded Travel Analytics a purpose built online reporting tool that turned unstructured GDS and mid-office travel data into dashboards that organizations used to understand how they spent their money on travel products brought through their travel management company partners. Travel Analytics grew from one subscriber to 2,500 subscribers over five years, including Australia’s largest travel account, the Australian Government. In early 2020, the largest university in Australia approached Simon to help them reinvent their travel program after an internal review showed a number of gaps. Simon agreed on one proviso - that he could build a platform that would allow the customer to manage their travel program independently from the travel management company. They agreed and we started to write our first line of code in February this year, and we already have our first customer using the platform. 

Naresh Tripathi (CTO) Naresh Tripathi is an experienced CTO with over 10 years within the travel industry. He has worked in B2C - retail and B2B environments internationally and understands pain points that affect large organizations trying to manage their travel program. He has led a small team of developers that helped build Travel Analytics and Trip Approve. His areas of expertise include high volume, high availability e-commerce and SaaS; technology and product innovation; scalable solutions architecture; product and commercial strategy; and cloud architecture and transformation.

How have you addressed diversity and inclusion within your business?

We have a team of six made up of Australians, Indian, Vietnamese and Singaporean. We also have two females on staff (including one female developer who is a gun). We provide people opportunities based on merit and their ability to do a job. We also work with student groups to provide them opportunities to get real life experience working in a startup environment. 

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

COVID-19. This has really dampened the appetite for organizations to be thinking about how they can better manage their travel. Countless people have contacted us to say can we chat in a few months’ time once we start to travel again. The COVID-19 restrictions will ease off at some stage and people will start to realize they need better processes in place to manage their people movements and reduce costs. People will engage once people understand what they can do with Trip Approve and how little it will cost them to roll it out within their organizations. 

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

We know the space extremely well and have been working with organizations for over a decade and have been wanting to build something like Trip Approve to better manage travel. Yes, there are applications like it in the market, however, most of them have booking solutions attached to the end of the process or they so over engineered people require a training course to use them. We're also in a community that provides plenty of support to get out there and tells people about what we are doing and how it will help change the way travel is managed. We're also focusing on bringing people into the business that will help us grow. We cannot do this by ourselves, and it is important we have the right people onboard to make it happen.

A year from now, what state do you think your startup will be in? 

We will have a number of customers using the application, and we will have a full range of products and services that allow organizations to manage their travel more efficiently than ever. We will also be leveraging word of mouth extensively and organizations will see Trip Approve as being an excellent alternative to traditional travel management services as we gain more and more traction in the market. 

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

We want to grow a business that people will want to partner or invest in because they believe they can help us create a better space, solve problems and make them money.