Tripkicks
Headquarters: New York
CEO: Jeff Berk
Since its launch nearly a decade ago, travel technology
add-on Tripkicks has become "known for our pivots," CEO Jeff Berk
said. Started with backing from Acquis Consulting Group, it first focused on
rewarding travelers for making better decisions, facing off against a pioneer
of that concept, Rocketrip. "As soon as we were getting off to the races,
the world shut down," Berk said.
With corporate travel largely at a standstill during the
Covid-19 pandemic, Tripkicks moved its focus to health and safety, working with
companies to fulfill communication needs as they restarted their travel
programs. As it did so, the Tripkicks team was learning about its clients'
communication needs outside of health and safety.
"Communication has always been a challenge, because you
have so many travelers, and you're not going to email them nonstop every
day," Berk said. "This is a problem that we can help with, and that's
what we've spend the past couple of years doing, going very deep with our
clients to learn what's really important for them."
Over that span came numerous partnerships looking to
Tripkicks to enable that communication. To name a few: BCD
Travel's Advito, which worked with Tripkicks to enable travelers to monitor
their carbon footprint within their online booking tool; SeatCash,
though which Tripkicks could offer guidance to travelers on the best time to
book their flights; and BTP
Automation, through which Tripkicks could show travelers amenities and
other benefits offered by preferred hotels in their programs.
In recent weeks, Tripkicks entered its next phase with the
launch of a new "intelligence layer," which it calls Catalyst, that
the company says can analyze, influence and improve traveler behavior and
program performance.
The launch of Catalyst, however, is not a pivot this time,
but "the most logical, expansion for us," Berk said. "It's just
building upon everything we've learned and is an opportunity we've seen in the
industry."
While Catalyst is still about communication, Berk said it is
differentiated by incorporating behavioral science to use messaging that is
most likely to drive travelers to the right behaviors, he said. That includes
knowing how best to phrase guidance and when to bring in supporting data. For
example, if a traveler is about to book a non-preferred hotel in a city where a
company's compliance is above 90 percent, mentioning that might apply the
appropriate peer pressure to motivate the traveler to shift to a preferred
hotel.
"How do we make a person not feel bad but still make
them feel like they should probably change their behavior?" Berk said.
"Everyone's got an opinion on these things, but the reality is there's a
science behind it, and we've been able to bring that into the platform."
Catalyst also can analyze travelers' information—their
transactional history and travel patterns, for example—to personalize
communication further, making sure they see communication how and when they
need to see it, he said. First-time travelers for a company can receive
hand-holding communications that road warriors will not receive, and habitual
policy violators can get escalating guidance to change their behavior.
When behavior begins to change, it can communicate positive
reinforcement, Berk said.
With the broadening of scope, Catalyst also is broadening
Tripkicks' communication capabilities to guide travelers throughout their
journey. Tripkicks primarily has focused on point-of-sale communication, but
Catalyst has integrations into a variety of platforms including Slack, Teams,
email and SMS to that it can communicate based on where travelers are.
"Because we're going very broad on helping a travel
program meet all of their goals, travelers need to see different things at
different times," Berk said. "They're not always going to be in the
online booking tool, if you're on your way to the airport or on your trip, so
it was important for us to say, 'What are the best ways to be able to reach
travelers?'"
It also includes an AI element that can answer travelers'
questions and cut down on travel managers' volume of requests.
Travel managers, meanwhile, can use Catalyst for guidance to
see where there are opportunities and look at comparisons to see how a
communication strategy is changing program behavior—an uptick in advance
booking compliance, for example. When an area sees improvement, communication
can back down, and travel managers also can weight goals and priorities to
ensure communication focuses first on their top priorities, Berk said.
The drive behind Catalyst, Berk said, was to give travel
managers bandwidth to address issues in their program that they know exist but must
take a backseat to more immediate issues.
"There's a finite list of things that travel managers
really care about, and if they had all the time in the world, they would focus
on all of those things, but the reality is, they don't," Berk said.
"We wanted to build a way so that a travel manager can focus on all the
things that matter."
Catalyst also will broaden Tripkicks' scope in the companies
it serves, Berk said. The company to date has focused largely on the upper end
of the market, but Catalyst was designed to be approachable for smaller
programs as well, he said.
"For the foreseeable future, we're always going to be
targeting managed travel programs, companies that work with a travel management
company, but the midmarket has not really been a focus," Berk said.
"One of the goals of Catalyst is to expand that so we can have a solution
that's also more suited towards midmarket."