CREATIVE THINKING
fare. “With 60 partners, we are getting fantastic fares from airlines, but it requires many combinations of entries to get a fare – it is a skill trying to remember them, and time consuming,” says director Scott Pawley. The tool cuts the time taken to return a fare by making entries automatically, once an agent has received destination, dates and airlines from a client. For example, an agent puts in London-New York with Virgin Atlantic and gets a fare; then they click Check Fare. “The tool seeks an unlimited number of other entries and shows them in order of price. The agent can choose one of them and
difficulties presented by the complexities of business travel: “With global systems, mul- tiple GDS, varying policies, negotiated rates and more, building a solution that accounts for all of this is very challenging,” says Irina Matz, senior director SolutionSource. “Add to that complexity: many of the systems that support corporate travel are closed and are not built to integrate with ad- ditional solutions. Enter APIs – they are those used for BCD technology such as TripSource and DecisionSource.”
SolutionSource apps include Lumo, Park ‘N Fly, International SOS, Yapta and Rock-
THE THREE-STAGE PROCESS TAKES 45 SECONDS… THE TOOL HAS BEEN RUN 34,000 TIMES MAKING AGGREGATE SAVINGS OF £26,396,050 FOR UK BUSINESSES
it automatically books the fare. It can take up to 12 minutes to do that manually,” he says. The agent can then check with a third-par- ty supplier outside the UK, to see whether the ticket is available for less. This might show a lower fare for the same airline, same day but different flight. Most recently, Skyscanner was added because Focus reckoned half its clients were either checking with Skyscanner before consulting them or afterwards, “and we might never hear from them again”, Pawley says.
The three-stage process takes all of 45 seconds and in the six years it has been operating, the tool has been run 34,000 times and has made an aggregate savings of £26,396,050 for UK businesses.
REVEALING YOUR SOURCES BCD Travel’s SolutionSource was launched in 2018 as a marketplace for third-party apps, currently numbering 19. The TMC vets all partners for client requirement, security, technical integration and more; ease of access for bookers and travellers is provided through open APIs. This overcomes the
buyingbusinesstravel.com
etrip, providing duty-of-care, guest travel, M&E, price monitoring, and more. And if the comment from a Fortune 100 pharma company is typical, clients are delighted: “Launching SolutionSource was genius; it’s exactly what we needed,” says one. “It makes us more comfortable knowing these solutions have been vetted and that they easily fit into our programme.”
A WORD IN YOUR EAR… Anyone running a global programme and dealing regularly with people whose first language is not English might be grateful to know that a room full of simultaneous interpreters is no longer necessary. The new Wordly app (
wordly.ai/) uses intuitive language, provided the speaker talks clearly and grammatically; if humans cannot understand it, the system probably can’t. The speaker uses a mobile device with the Wordly app, which interprets speech into up to 15 languages; on the Wordly attendee app, the listener or delegate selects their language and receives the text and audio of the speech in real time. Voila!
2020 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 79
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