Nearly three months since travel and expense platform Emburse announced the acquisition of reshopping and auditing specialist Tripbam, the two companies unveiled their first collaborative development at the BTN Group’s Innovate event in New York City this week – and landed the People’s Choice award for their efforts.
Announcing the integration of Tripbam’s re-shopping offers in the popular Emburse Go app, Tripbam CEO and founder Steve Reynolds said it was a “combination of technologies we’ve been waiting to build for a long time” and which a number of buyers had been calling for pre-Covid. “This is all about the cost saving side from Tripbam and the traveller satisfaction with Emburse Go,” he added.
Positioning the development in a world in which travel programmes are getting smaller and more complex, savings are harder to identify, and travellers are increasingly self-sufficient, Reynolds said the functionality would help companies simultaneously reduce spend and improve the traveller experience.
Provisionally dubbed Tripbam Go, the development is currently being piloted and fine-tuned and is expected to be rolled-out by the year’s end. The results so far are promising, said Reynolds, who explained take-up of re-shop offers in Emburse Go has been five times higher than it typically sees via email where the acceptance rate is, on average, from five to 10 per cent.
The upshot is in an increase in programme-wide savings. “Typically via email, how we’ve done it historically, we’d get savings of about five per cent. Now we can get that to 20-25 per cent,” said Reynolds.
“You can present the options to travellers but you can’t make them take it. The problem is traveller engagement,” he added. But by presenting re-shop offers natively in-app and actionable at the slide of a button, the technology offers a pathway to “sexy, simple savings”.
As with Tripbam’s existing re-shopping functionality, offers in Emburse Go are based on customers’ policies while travellers’ personal preferences can be set-up via users’ profiles within the app.
“Imagine the day before a trip you get a message: ‘We found a better deal, swipe to unlock your deal’. Just tap the button and you’re done,” said Jeroen van Velzen, senior vice president, solutions strategy at Emburse. “It’s not just a cheaper hotel we’re recommending, it can also be a better room, a better location, a preferred brand.”
Adoption of the Emburse Go app is around 90 per cent among frequent travellers. “Once travellers get the app it’s extremely sticky and they’re very reliant on it,” said Reynolds. “Engagement is the part we’ve been missing.”
Flight re-shopping in Emburse Go is also on the roadmap while another phase could see the introduction of scorecards within the app reporting on travellers’ performance with regards compliance, sustainability and other metrics.
While the development was not the judges’ winning development – that went to mobility platform HQ – it did secure the most votes of the 13 Innovation Faceoff participants from buyer attendees.
“It’s very clear to see the value that’s offered by combining the two services – saving money, increased satisfaction and driving adoption,” said Dennis Vilovic, founder & co-CEO of Troop, and one of this year’s judges, having been named the Innovate winner in 2022.