Filter in or out as many as 200 cities, as well as hotel and car rental class and meals of the day and watch as the per-diem calculator automatically adjusts per diems to your program. Drill down into cost breakdowns and export the results.
Le Meridien Etoile – 4 October, 2019
London Marriott Hotel Regents Park – 7 October, 2019
Westin Georgetown Hotel – October 11, 2019
Following a spate of partnerships with third-party travel service providers, travel management company Direct Travel has launched a marketplace to serve as a one-stop shop from which corporate clients can select products and services for their travel programs.
Dubbed TravelStack, the marketplace features four categories of providers: program management, cost savings, risk management and traveler experience. Among the providers are booking and expense specialists Concur, Certify/Chrome River, Deem and Zeno, along with incentivization provider Rocketrip, reporting service Direct Intelligence and flight disruption specialist Service. Also featured are virtual payments pioneer Conferma; price assurance specialists Fairfly, Tripbam and Yapta; and duty of care managers International SOS and WorldAware, among others.
Overall, TravelStack offers more than 30 partners through reseller agreements, and Direct Travel will add more. To help navigate the available offerings, the TMC will provide tailored consultation to clients interested in adding services through the marketplace, according to Direct Travel SVP of business development and strategies Ronda Shipley. “As customers and buyers express interest in one or multiple TravelStack technologies or services, our team of experts will work with them to determine the right solutions to achieve their objectives.”
As innovation has ramped up in the corporate travel space, TMCs have positioned themselves as bridges to third-party services for their clients. Major players like CWT and American Express Global Business Travel have brought startups and other third-party providers under their own umbrellas via acquisitions and partnerships. But others have focused on a marketplace model, most notably BCD Travel, which in early 2018 launched SolutionSource.
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But it’s not just TMCs that see value in serving as a conduit to other service providers. Data aggregator Traxo offers an eponymous marketplace of its own, enabling clients to funnel data captured by Traxo’s email filtering tool and direct supplier integrations directly to third-party providers’ systems. That automatic sharing of data across platforms often is cited as a key advantage of such marketplace programs, enabling multiple services to operate efficiently and cooperatively to serve the unique needs of a given corporate travel program.
For Direct Travel, the launch of TravelStack follows reseller deals the TMC struck over that past year with several of the providers now in the marketplace, including Service, Yapta and Zeno.
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