As 'Blind Spots' Widen, Traxo Targets Off-Channel Opportunities

Off-channel booking aggregator Traxo has had a flurry of partnership announcements in recent months, including a new relationship with CWT, integration into Cornerstone Information Systems and becoming a feature for Booking.com’s business platform. Traxo founder and CEO Andres Fabris spoke with BTN executive editor Michael B. Baker during the recent Phocuswright Conference about what is driving partnership growth as well as where Traxo will focus its technology strategy in the coming year. An edited transcript follows.

BTN: Where are you seeing the biggest interest from potential partners?

Andres Fabris: There’s a lot of interest in structured travel data, and we’re seeing interest across the whole travel ecosystem. You saw the announcement with Cornerstone, which is more about the back office and mid-office on the [travel management company] side. We’ve seen interest from CWT, which is essentially referring their clients to the Traxo system. 

Duty-of-care providers feel like the blind spots that they have are getting bigger, because almost all of the duty-of-care providers tend to get feeds and data from the TMC and [global distribution system] channels. As those bookings to continue to shift direct, that blind spot gets bigger and bigger. 

We see that in the form of partnerships throughout the ecosystem. Expense providers also crave the data to pre-fill out the expense reports. With the duty-of-care providers, the more data they have, the more comprehensive visibility, the better they can do their job. They can keep more people safe because they’re aware of that location. 

On the corporate side, which is our main focus, we’re seeing a surge of interest of corporations realizing the same thing. Every time they hear the words [New Distribution Capability], retailing revolution, supplier direct and airline portals, they get concerned about how they’re going to get that visibility in an environment where the traveler is being tempted to book across a variety of different places.

BTN: Are your duty-of-care relationships direct with the providers or via TMCs?

Fabris: It’s direct relationships with them. It’s two different aspects. The way that the duty-of-care providers historically have gotten information about a traveler that booked outside of the platform into their system was that the traveler had to go in and fill out a form manually. Travelers get busy and they forget, and they don’t necessarily want to broadcast that they have just booked something out of policy, so the adoption rate there has historically been maybe 5 percent. The next generation was, instead of entering it by hand, you can forward your confirmation to International SOS or Crisis 24. Behind the scenes, Traxo is powering all of their sites, including the data processing. That’s Generation 2, because it’s easier than manually entering it, so adoption rates are maybe 20 percent, but you’re still missing the other 80 percent.

Now, the reason we have these direct duty-of-care relationships, is we are able to auto-detect all of the bookings for every travel site service point of sale around the world for the entire company in real time, and provide that information to the company. Now the company is saying, “Please send that downstream to our duty-of-care provider,” so now we have direct relationships with those duty-of-care providers and plumbing in place where we can shift data down to them. Even those duty-of-care providers are starting to refer business to Traxo, so in a lot of cases, we have referral relationships. They know if Traxo’s involved, their visibility improves, and the value proposition grows. It’s a very symbiotic relationship.

BTN: What about expense partners?

Fabris: We’ve been powering data processing for Chrome River, Coupa, Abacus, Roadmap, several others. It’s the same value proposition. There, the realizing is, there’s pretty much a one-to-one correlation between a business trip and expense report, and all the raw materials that go into an expense report, all the data elements from the trip, and of course the traveler would prefer not to have to painstakingly enter a folio by hand. It’s much easier if you can forward in a folio. We’re getting closer to either a zero-effort expense report or get rid of the expense report altogether. 

BTN: To what extent is airlines’ NDC push driving interest in Traxo?

Fabris: The airlines are just getting started. Just to kind of get folks a peek around the corner off what’s coming, we launched a site, NDC Tracker, where we track the progress and the investments that all the airlines are making. There are 67 airlines that are making NDC investments and have made NDC-related announcements. It is something that is going to continue to create a bit of concern and a little bit of chaos. I don’t see it getting better. 

I see a couple of different approaches that different companies are taking. Some are focused on building the best booking tool and user interface, and the theory is, if I build a better mousetrap, that will magically prevent people from going off-platform. We’ve been building better mousetraps for 20 years, and there’s still 50 percent leakage. There’s another set that say it’s not a [user interface/user experience] issue, it’s a content issue, and if only I were able to get all of the content, then that would prevent leakage. The third bucket is the philosophy that I’ll change the behavior of the traveler, use incentives to drive certain behavior. If I use the right incentives, then magically there will no longer be leakage. 

Our view is that, for all three, you can get up to a certain point but they are not the answer, because we’ve been trying it as an industry for decades. This data is out there, you ought to know about it, and we can detect it for you seamlessly. Frankly, we don’t care what you do with it. Most of our clients use it to drive compliance and get people back on the platform. A third or our clients go the opposite direction, especially the professional services firms that are in a war for talent. If they give their road warriors a little extra flexibility, maybe that’s an extra retention tool. There’s no easy answer, but if companies don’t do anything, the blind spots are going to get bigger and bigger. 

BTN: In terms of direct corporate business, will large companies still be the focus, or is there an opportunity with small and midsized clients?

Fabris: Historically, we’ve had a small but mighty team, so we aim those limited resources at the large accounts, where we can make the biggest influence. That has been our direct focus. We have relationships with TMCs that are reseller relationships to go after the top of the pyramid. midmarket, we have 20 to 25 referral partnerships, so it’s a little more fragmented. We can be the service provider behind the scenes. At the bottom of the pyramid, the SMEs or unmanaged programs, we now have a new self-service capability. We announced a relationship with Booking.com for Business. 

The nature of that is, we have now built a self-service version of Traxo. It is live and deployed on Booking.com for Business. It’s already live for the U.S. and administrators who have identified English as their primary language. Now, we have an ability to help SMEs as well. I don’t want to necessarily go out and find them individually, so we’re interested in partnering with companies that already have an army of SMEs. That same capability we’re offering can be offered to banks. A lot of banks are making moves into travel and have a lot of credit card holders and account holders who tend to be SMEs.

BTN: What’s your focus for technology development? Is it all about artificial intelligence?

Fabris: We already incorporate some AI, machine learning, natural language processing in our data processing. You’ll see us focus much more on getting from data to insights. We have all the data across every point of sale in the world. The next step is, what are you going to do with it? Do you need to go out and negotiate better rates? Do you need to crack the whip on compliance? Do you need to get more dynamic hotel pricing? That’s going to come through a series of visualization tools. We want to add the ability for someone to speak to the application, prompt it, maybe a bar like you can see on ChatGPT and it understands the query. 

We’re also creating the ability to deliver a Monday morning report. You set it up, and instead of you coming and getting it from us, it just gets deposited right in your inbox. We’re also doing the ability to bulk upload. Let’s say you have a big corporate event and a rooming list. You can also get that into the system as well. Today, that does not come necessarily via confirmations. 

The last place, where we’re spending a lot of time and energy, is establishing more connections, connectors that are already pre-built, so the menu where Traxo can move data to gets broader and broader.