And, when it comes to the world of startups, business travel is an exciting place to be. Four business travel technology startups – Lumo, TripStax, Zenmer and DwellOptimal – will be taking part in the Business Travel Innovation Faceoff Europe 2024 at Business Travel Show Europe from 19-20 June at ExCeL, London.

Nikunj Agrawal, Founder & CEO, Zenmer

What do you do?

We enable TMCs and Corporations to book, manage and track business travel ‘sustainably’ on an Open-API based shared platform.

What problem does your innovation solve? 

For several decades, travel has been managed using legacy software and processes that stops the industry from making quick technical innovation to support the needs of an ever-changing market; especially new content, communication channels, AI, personalisation and more. TMCs and corporations work in their own silos using applications that don’t talk to each other in real time and don't innovate at the pace of the growing needs of our industry.

Zenmer is built using modern microservices, which allows for an Open-API based platform that’s agnostic to any supplier or third-party application. We’re not just another agent desktop or an online booking tool (OBT), rather a common platform for TMCs, corporations, suppliers, and tech companies to work under one roof. We also have our own Order Management System (OMS) that allows for data standardisation, order creation and end-to-end servicing of any content source like the GDS, LCCs, NDC, aggregators, etc. With our agile processes and modern architecture, we’re able to ship new modules, content, and features in weeks instead of quarters/years.

What are the benefits to travellers and organisations with travellers? 

• Global corporations can work multiple TMCs for different regions and sync data with their preferred third-party applications like HRMS, Reporting, Analytics, Expense, etc.
• Single UX for CFOs, travel managers and all global employees to track and manage a global travel program in one single dashboard.
• Travelers can track CO2 emissions at Point of Sale and organisations can empower travellers to offset their emissions as part of their booking flow.
• Organisations can spot discrepancies in their supplier contracts using our Contract Auditing module.

What are your plans for future growth? 

• Keep adding richer personalised content and flexible payment options
• Empower TMCs to drive personalisation using B2C-style marketing automation that increases them ancillary revenues, in turn fuelling our growth
• Reduce time-to-ticket for travellers, that helps save unproductive time for travellers and agents, in turn increasing online adoption rates.

What will it mean to you to win the Innovation Faceoff at Business Travel Show Europe?

Winning isn’t the most exciting goal with this presentation as we strongly believe that the industry needs more innovation to be seen and used at scale. We hope all new and modern startups get their visibility and customers so that collectively our industry grows faster.

The most exciting part is presenting our technology to industry veterans from various verticals in the industry, which creates a huge opportunity to get first-hand feedback from our potential customers and users.

Having said that, winning such a FaceOff helps massively increase our awareness and confidence to continue innovating.