Travel Procurement - FEBRUARY 2018

www.businesstravelnews.com/procurement FEBRUARY 2018 / 15

BCD Travel has launched a marketplace of third- party travel technology solutions called Solution- Source. The platform is geared toward travel managers and sourcing professionals and joins BCD’s TripSource and DecisionSource platforms.

BCD SVP of product planning and development Yannis Karmis said the travel management company has seen a pickup in the pace of new technology entrants in the managed corporate travel space in recent years, which is exciting for BCD and its customers. At the same time, it creates challenges for how to work with providers and deploy technology effectively.

“We’ve had relationships with
third parties for a long time,”
Karmis said. “But we really
haven’t had a consistent en-
gagement model for how we
put these relationships in place,
how we manage the flow of data,
how we manage the implemen-
tation process with these stan-
dards in place.”
The platform, Karmis said, is
“an express lane” for deployment,

which gives visibility to BCD clients and eases adoption. SolutionSource has nine launch partners:

• Freebird, a solution that allows business travelers to instantly book a new ticket after a flight disruption via their mobile device.

• Rocketrip, an incentive platform that rewards employees for saving money on business trips.

• Yapta, a platform with airfare and hotel rate tracking tools that identify savings opportunities.

• iJet, an integrated risk management provider.

• FairFly, a tool to monitor drops in airfare to capture savings.

• Tripbam, a hotel reshopping tool that captures savings after rates drop at a single property or in a geographic cluster.

• Anvil, a travel risk solutions provider.

• Taxeo, a solution for VAT reclaim.

• CIBTvisas, a travel visa and passport company.

BCD director of product plan-
ning Irina Matz said some of those
providers come from longstanding
BCD partnerships already in place
while others are new and based on
potential client need. “As we con-
tinue to bring partners on board, we
look at each of them to make sure
that they bring value to our clients,”
Matz said. “We make sure that we’ve
done a security technology assess-
ment, make sure that we’ve got a
really defined workflow for them
and make sure that they can
integrate across all of our plat-
forms.” There is a large pipeline
of additional partners poised to
join the platform, Matz said. Such
partners could include niche book-
ing providers, chat technologies
and other solutions for corporate
travel clients.

All BCD clients have access to SolutionSource, much in the way they all have access to TripSource and DecisionSource. The three platforms work together, Karmis said. For example, reservation data that’s viewable to the traveler through TripSource is also fed into DecisionSource and then may flow back out to Tripbam for price monitoring or iJet for safety and security. “These platforms are very interconnected and will continue to get more and more interconnected as the technology evolves,” Karmis said.

SolutionSource is live for BCD clients. Matz declined to provide details on the revenue model but said BCD does have commercial agreements in place with all its launch partners.