Meeting this year's Innovation Faceoff's finalists

Returning to the Business Travel Show Europe this month, on the 29th and 30th June, at the ExCeL London is the Innovation Faceoff, a competition set out to find the most disruptive tech set to revolutionise business travel and six of this year’s nine finalists are startups. 

We've met Arise Travel, Jyrney, Simard, Table4One, TripStax and TripShift ahead of the event to find out what makes their tech so special.

You can read about Arise Travel and Jyrney's stories here, and Simard and Table4One's journey here.

But here we present our final two startups... 

TRIPSTAX

Just last year (2021), Jack Ramsey, CEO set out to create TripStax, a business that allows you to get more innovation, better tech, and more of what your customers want, for less.

1

What do you do?

TripStax is a fully connected modular stack of industry-leading proprietary business travel applications driven by The Core, a central data powerhouse that consumes, enriches and manages all business traveller booking, profile and invoice data across the entire TripStax eco-system. The Core is a key market-differentiator. As the sole source of a TMC’s corporate client data, The Core is the ‘nerve system’ that drives and determines how this data is used across each module in the stack. Not only does The Core seamlessly interact with the TripStax modules (Approve, Profile, Track, Analytics, Content, Docs, Mobile) but a plethora of third-party technologies used by TMCs.

TripStax is built on a ground-breaking, cost-reducing, commercial model for our TMC customers. The majority of legacy travel technology providers charge TMCs transaction fees based on the consumption and storage of data.  TMCs have to pay a fee every time the data is stored and transposed by each vendor. TMCs using TripStax are only charged once for ingestion of booking, profile or finance data, regardless of how many times that data is processed within one of the modules in the stack.

What problem does your innovation solve?

The core purpose of business travel hasn’t changed – it’s still about providing travel booking mechanisms and ancillary products for companies and their employees who need to make trips for work reasons. Technology providers have evolved but in so doing, the industry has become very complex.  The tech used to manage business travel purely pivots around the exchange of data.  In a world with multiple tech providers all looking to provide solutions to TMCs based on these same data sets, there is high cost, complex integration requirements and a reliance on very few people who actually understand the ‘spaghetti’ of integrations. From an industry perspective, TripStax aims to untangle the spaghetti and uncouple technology from its reliance on transactional economics. From a customer perspective we are enabling TMCs to mitigate the cost of developing and implementing their own technology solutions, thus enabling them to digitalise their tech offering cost effectively and strategically. Post pandemic, SME-sized TMCs need to increase their competitiveness in the market, remain relevant and enhance customer service delivery. TripStax enables them to do that by giving access to premium, versatile travel technology that previously was not available to them and was also unaffordable for a TMC of their size.

What are the benefits to travellers and organisations with travellers?

For the TMC’s corporate customer, TripStax brings valuable benefits:

  • A much better user experience for the traveller as their profile data is 100% consistent across all applications
  • Complete consistency of data across any application because the profile and booking data (both GDS and non-GDS) is available in any module via the Core – this means itineraries, traveller tracking, approval processes are all 100% accurate for each traveller
  • Better analytics, reporting and predictive analytics as all data is stored in once single place
  • Real time traveller tracking and superior support with duty of care
  • Strong data security and privacy

What are your plans for future growth?

We are already growing rapidly as TripStax is a live tech product consuming over 3 million bookings per annum from various TMC clients who are already on board, including ATPI as our flagship customer. We’ve just signed an agreement with a major TMC in North America and we’re finalising deals in Spain and Germany. Our pipeline has gone into overdrive since we officially launched in March this year. In the mid to longer term, we will continue to drive innovation and future development of the TripStax eco-system – it’s an ongoing process and we have a large team of IT and product developers, led by our CTO, who are dedicated to the organic development of TripStax.  In addition, we are looking at further tech enhancements of TripStax via acquisition.  

What will it mean to you to win the Innovation Faceoff?

It would be amazing if we won! We would be over the moon!

Complete this sentence. Business Travel Show Europe is the place to …  

build momentum and awareness of TripStax as a dynamic new tech provider and how we are redefining the tech landscape for TMCs and their customers.

TRIPSHIFT

Founding TripShift back in January 2020, Andrew Hughes, Founder & CEO explains that TripShift provides automated carbon tracking solutions for employee commutes, business travel and transport.

2

What do you do?

Scope three travel and transport emissions, made simple. TripShift provides automated carbon tracking solutions for employee commutes, business travel and transport.

What problem does your innovation solve?

Under the new TCFD regulations (April 2022) many businesses are now required to track and report the emissions and impact from their scope 3 carbon emissions which has been defined to include employee commuting, business travel and logistical transport across their business and also their supply chains.

What are the benefits to travellers and organisations with travellers?

Manually tracking and compiling data across an organisation would be a resource intensive task before the business has even begun to understand the data and look at ways of reducing their carbon impact on their journey towards NetZero. TripShift automates the process collecting the data across the organisation, visualising and highlighting areas that the business can make practical reductions in their emissions profile. TripShift also engages with employees using gamification and behavioural change techniques to engage them with the carbon reduction process voluntarily. Creating a win/win situation for the business helping to address climate change requirements while working closely with their employees to create better engagement and results. TripShift is an enabler turning NetZero strategy into action.  

What are your plans for future growth?

The technology is now proven, and early customers are already onboard. The technology works anywhere in the world and our challenge now is to grow globally just as our clients travel requirements take them on global journeys. We want them all to move better with TripShift.

What will it mean to you to win the Innovation Faceoff?

A huge opportunity to increase awareness of TripShift. Everybody cares about climate change but TripShift makes it easy for everybody to travel but still reduce business and individual emissions. We literally want to help you move better.

Complete this sentence. Business Travel Show Europe is the place to … 

...do business by moving better with TripShift, tracking and reducing your emissions, taking carbon out of the environment.