BCD Travel this week said it extended its SolutionSource marketplace concept, giving external developers more application programming interfaces to work with.
The related, publicly available Developer Hub details new APIs for access to traveler profiles plus shopping and booking of air, car
The program aims to topple some of the barriers to innovation that corporate travel professionals and entrepreneurs have discussed for several years.
Developers may be clients or BCD’s TMC partners as well as startups or established tech firms. The hub also offers technical documentation and sample code. Developers can “harness” BCD’s multi-source booking repository, content hub and policy rules engine to create “specialized solutions” for clients, according to a prepared statement. The APIs are the same as what BCD uses internally.
“Tech companies want deeper, more integrated access to BCD,” said BCD Travel senior VP of product planning and development Yannis Karmis during a Monday interview. “They want tighter and more holistic integration for automated transaction management or robotic process automation.”
Karmis said the “orchestrated” APIs enable programming tailored to BCD’s environment and clients.
Lacking orchestration “puts the burden on the developer to understand the more complicated nuances of corporate travel — how to format a passenger name record, how to merge policy with a display, what reportable fields clients need,” said Karmis. “Orchestration also marries that API with a set of rules and policies. We leverage our central administrative functions as a way of accelerating time to market.”
BCD Travel charges participating developers a fee, but Karmis said the goal was less about making a business of selling APIs and more about “opening our systems and capabilities to make it easier for third parties to deliver more innovation.”
Irina Matz, BCD Travel senior director of SolutionSource, explored some of the obstacles to innovation during a handful of education sessions at the Global Business Travel Association convention in August. One of her purposely provocative questions to about a dozen speakers representing startups was whether corporate travel is really complex or if that’s just an excuse for slow innovation.
The speakers said that ease of integration with TMCs was important to corporate buyers and that customers almost always asked about it.
“It’s very complex, especially in the TMC space and with all the different third-party tools that are strung together to manage a customer,” said Mary Ellen George, Tramada’s head of North America. “Think about the flexibility they need to meet customer needs. Every company has its nuances. That creates a complex model to fulfill and manage.”
“We find the industry has created it this way because it has evolved over decades,” said HelloGbye COO Michael Carr. “Consolidation and access to data is harder than it should be. Working with TMCs, we find they have corporate policies and personal profiles of travelers that can be in seven or 15 systems and spreadsheets. We have to consolidate that and do something with it after decades of neglect.”
“The challenge is the time scales that corporations operate on,” said Shep co-founder and CEO Daniel Senyard. “We operate in days and weeks, and you operate in quarters. It’s challenging to align them.”
Part of the benefit of working with SolutionSource is that BCD Travel saves clients time by vetting participating developers.
“We review and understand how their product works, we conduct a security assessment, we align on what I call the optimal tech setup for the best and most technologically advanced and secure way to access our system, and we also work together to outline standard implementation and a go-to-market strategy,” said Matz during the Monday interview.
Although the expanded SolutionSource adds to the marketplace concept in terms of utility, other TMCs also offer programs to expedite client adoption of third-party partners. Examples include Direct Travel’s new TravelStack portfolio, which has more than 30 add-ons, and the platform concept from Egencia. Those offer clients info on externally developed applications that have been vetted and approved, cutting costs and speeding up implementation.
“With how quickly technology is moving, there is a lot of turnover in terms of what ‘best in class’ is, based upon what you need,” said Direct Travel senior vice president of operations Christine Sikes during a GBTA-New Jersey event in September. “Everybody wants something that is a little bit different. You have to be able to solve for that.” The marketplace concept is cost-effective. To build and maintain proprietary technology, Sikes said, would “add $10 to $12 a transaction.”
“There are two schools of thought on this,” said former BCD Travel exec Louise Miller of Areka Consulting. “Some are 100 percent closed ecosystems and I don’t see those players being interested in this. Some clients want everything in a package and don’t want to think about the components. I don’t know that any company has the perfect plan.”
Thus far, 300
Matz said some corporate clients had shown interest in building on the developer program, in some cases using other third parties. “We can’t share any examples yet, but we have had a handful of clients tell us that the way they’re doing something today is clunky, and this is how they aspire to do it in the future,” she said.
Related
• GoldSpring Consulting On How Buyers Should Assess Direct Vs. TMC-Provided Technology
• Lumo To Add Flight Predictions To BCD Travel Marketplace
• Analysts Examine Journera, SalesTrip, TravelBank, TravelPerk
• Experts See Artificial Intelligence Boosting Travel Management Innovation
• Tom Tulloch On APIs: What They Are And What They Mean For Travel Management
• Direct Selling Point: Systems Integration
I really like that the marketplace has these two open shops (BCD Solution Source and Direct Travel TravelStack). It brings another version of travel management to the buyer. More to come!