TRAVEL tech evangelist Johnny Thorsen, who has his own vision of a “Traveltopia”, is watching to see if Covid will give the industry a new generation of well-funded startups “that are able to go after the long term opportunity, and really become a threat to the established environment”.
Speaking at the WiT Travel Roadshow, Episode 3, he said, “Big crises normally deliver big disruption long term and I do think we will see something unexpected come out of the Covid recovery phase.”
He added, “One of the problems we’ve seen in the travel industry for a long time is that most travel tech startups are under-funded. In other words, they don’t have the kind of funding to stay true to a strategy long enough to really get to a point where they become independent. So they either have to partner up very early on with the legacy players and that does limit their freedom and their ability to innovate, because obviously, you’re not going to work against a partner.”
Thorsen said the new startups to come will have a critical role to “finally create a digital foundation for TMCs”.
A week after he said this came the news in Business Travel News that meetings technology provider Troop is now incorporating carbon-emissions data from Thrust Carbon, “offering clients during the planning process additional insight into the potential environmental impact of a given meeting”.
Troop co-founder Dennis Vilovic said the alliance with Thrust Carbon will enrich the platform’s emissions evaluation capability and “allow us to offer a very detailed CO2 analysis to our customers,” he said. That analysis factors in variables including travel modes, accommodation, meeting venue and catering.
London-based Thrust Carbon has been in talks with major corporate travel agencies and technology platforms to form partnerships and integrate carbon data with travel reporting and company recently integrated with the American Express GBT data environment “in a way that allows mutual clients to sync sustainability calculations with their entire feed of travel transactions happening at GBT,” director of partnerships Glenn Thorsen told BTN.
These are the kinds of micro-services Thorsen believes will underpin the changes to come in the corporate travel and events sector.
Commenting on the recent spate of acquisitions in the corporate travel space – Egencia going to American Express GBT and TripActions taking on Reed & MacKay, Thorsen said, “Most TMCs today, from small to big, are people heavy, meaning most of the people are there to deliver travel service. And then you have a few of the new ones that are tech heavy, so they use technology to drive much higher productivity and they’re also better prepared for delivering and launching new services.
“However, if they start acquiring like they’re doing right now, they make life hard for themselves, because now they’re getting the old fragmented tech stack problem.”
He said the Amex GBT move on Egencia “is great in terms of scale, but it’s going to be another very complex tech consolidation of very different platforms. And if I were a buyer, I would rather have my supplier creating new services than integrate legacy systems.”
Thorsen cited two startups that he thought were doing interesting things.
• UK-based Kyte which is developing an API engine that can go on top of an airline’s legacy infrastructure. “Instead of saying it’s NDC or nothing, Kyte provides an airline with a modern API stack that they can put on top. And now they can use NDC, or other capabilities and they can start ‘retailising’ their infrastructure, both for their own purpose, but also for third parties in the industry.”
• Danish startup, Pere, that rewards personal referrals. “It has developed a recommendation engine that manage the money flow from, say, a concierge in a hotel. They are now able to put a process in place so wherever you go on that recommendation, something will flow back to the person that sent you there. This is the first example that I’ve seen of technology moving into the recommendation world in general.”
Watch the interview with Johnny Thorsen below.
• Featured image credit: yuyutbaskoro/Getty Images
