As part of Travelport’s growing Beyond Air portfolio and its strategy to redefine travel commerce, the company has invested in Melbourne-based travel technology company, Locomote, with a 49% share.
Post-trip reporting on Locomote platform
However, no other details of the the acquisition were disclosed
Locomote was developed to change the current travel management landscape by empowering organisations to have complete control and visibility of their global travel programme and travel supply chain. It has developed a platform to empower corporations in the seamless management of their travel, authorisation and procurement processes, including corporate traveller profile management, pre-trip approvals and duty of care capabilities.
It also enables easy integration of third-party, complementary applications that an individual corporation might want to add to its travel and/or authorisation processes.
The platform was initially designed for mobile. It uses all of Travelport’s Universal Profile, Universal Record, travel policy engine and Travelport’s state of the art uAPI (Universal Application Programming Interface), from which it obtains real time access to Travelport’s content, including low cost and network carriers, airline ancillary products, car rental and all of the industry leading, broad range of hotel properties and rates that Travelport now distributes.
The company has a number of big companies on board as users of its travel management platform including ANZ Bank, World Vision, Medibank, and Allen & Overy and Glencore.
Gordon Wilson, president and CEO of Travelport, said Travelport’s investment in Locomote would strengthen offering to both corporates and TMCs from an end-to-end customer experience perspective.
“We believe that further assets Travelport has recently acquired, such as the corporate hotel booking company Hotelzon, will add even more differentiated content to the Locomote offering in the near future.”
Philip Weinman, Locomote CEO and executive chairman, added the partnership was about giving our corporate travel customers a greater level of control over their own travel programmes.
“It will save businesses time and money and allow them to make the most of their travel budgets in real time. The platform we have developed is designed to be constantly added to, to keep pace with emerging trends as well as changing corporate customer needs.”
eNetts – Travelport’s JV with PSP International
In a related development, Travelport on August 1 announced it had upped its ownership stake in eNett International, its joint venture with PSP International established in 2009 to provide state-of-the-art innovative and integrated payment solutions tailored specifically for the travel industry.
Since the joint venture’s inception Travelport has held a majority stake of 57%, while PSP had the remainder. The successful first five years of operation has seen the business develop from incubation, through launch and it has now become a growing part of Travelport’s Beyond Air portfolio
Under the deal Travelport acquired an additional 16% from PSP raising its holding to 73% in a transaction, which values the eNett business at US$450 million.
At the same time, PSP has entered into a long-term agreement with eNett to provide various banking services to the company including PSP becoming the primary issuer of Virtual Account Numbers (VANS) used by eNett.
“eNett is a significant element in realising Travelport’s goal to redefine travel commerce, enabling a range of state-of-the-art and innovative alternative payment methods for B2B transactions which represent a considerable global market opportunity,” said Travelport’s Wilson.
Using unique MasterCard VANs, eNett provides travel companies with a fast, easy and secure way to pay or to be paid, reducing the risk of fraudulent transactions and improving overall payment, reconciliation and tracking processes.
