Lufthansa, TripActions Go Live with BusinessToGo Platform

The Lufthansa Group and TripActions have launched a co-branded travel booking and management platform for small and medium-sized companies, the companies announced.

The BusinessToGo platform, announced to be in development late last year, provides direct access to flight content from the Lufthansa Group and its joint-venture partners as well as hotel, train and car rental content from TripActions. The content includes “attractive” New Distribution Capability offers from Lufthansa and TripActions’ negotiated hotel rates. The platform also provides reporting on duty-of-care and carbon emissions, management data and centralized billing.

Members of Lufthansa’s SME rewards program, PartnerPlusBenefit, are able to collect and redeem points through the platform as well.

Lufthansa and TripActions launched BusinessToGo with two service tiers. The “Essentials” tier has neither monthly fees nor transaction fees but does have a support request fee of €22 or $25 per request. With the “Premium” tier, companies pay a transaction fee of €22 or $25 as well as a monthly fee, if they have at least 15 active travelers, of €7 or $9 per user, for which they receive unlimited support and extra support in onboarding and configuring the platform. The Premium tier also provides access to airlines outside of Lufthansa and its partners as well as support for a company’s own negotiated deals with hotels and car rental companies and integrations, such as with expense and human resources systems.

With Wednesday’s launch, the platform is available in Lufthansa’s home markets of Austria, Germany and Switzerland as well as Belgium. Additional markets will be added “successively” as well as additional features including upgrades, corporate products and additional languages, according to the companies.

Michael B. Baker  www.businesstravelnews.com