Grapevine Wins BTN Group 2021 Business Travel Innovator Award
The BTN Group on Oct. 22 held its 8th annual Innovate in person at Convene on Liberty St., in the hub of New York’s financial district. This year, business travel tools and services that engender trust through collaboration and personalization in the managed travel ecosystem ruled the day.
2021 Business Travel Innovator of the Year
U.K.-based business travel trip experience startup Grapevine captured the votes of Innovate judges Steve Clagg, travel technology manager for Microsoft; Jennifer Steinke, global head of travel for PPD; Susan Lichtenstein, managing partner of DigiTravel Consulting; and Susan Hopley, CEO of The Data Exchange.
Grapevine’s artificial intelligence engine fills the gap of managing the in-destination business travel experience. It’s currently designed to improve how travel management companies engage with travelers and drive ancillary booking revenue. It launched in 2019 with a leading U.K.-based TMC and since has signed partnerships with Advantage Travel Network and WIN Global Network, also based in the UK. Earlier this month, Grapevine won top innovation honors at The Business Travel Show Europe.
Grapevine CEO Jack Dow pointed to the product’s “intelligent and contextual retargeting for travelers.” He cited the follow scenarios: “Plane delay? Get lounge access. Heavy traffic? Get an early taxi. The AI is always learning. The secret sauce is in the AI engine that identifies booking opportunities throughout the journey.”
Innovate judges praised Grapevine’s ability to target and contextualize right-time trip offers. Because it’s run by an AI engine, TMC agents do not get involved in the process. “But what’s in it for the traveler?” asked judge Lichtenstein.
Dow replied that the company allows the traveler to manage his or her own profile to get more personalized recommendations. Next up, the startup will contemplate how to get loyalty information into the tool for a more comprehensive understanding of the traveler.
Judges’ final recommendations for Grapevine included exploring a traveler-focused app that might also be offered directly to the corporate. “We want to do more than drive revenue for our TMCs,” said lead judge Steve Clagg.
The People’s Choice
Conference attendees voted for a separate People’s Choice award-winner, which went to PSNGR1, a source-agnostic booking tool, designed to help travelers and travel managers understand business travel in a remote-work world.
In addition to displaying disparate content sources—including New Distribution Capability content—in a single next-generation storefront compatible with ATPCO requirements, the booking platform offers collaborative trip planning that allows users to duplicate bookings and add trip events like meals or meetings to a joint itinerary with individual travel records that are serviced separately by the TMC.
The platform also features contract performance tracking, with features that allow suppliers to offer high-performing clients to access what PSNGR1 CEO Chris Moss called “microdeals” which could kick in programmatically. Moss additionally cited the tool’s ‘marketplace’ philosophy that would allow corporates to connect the platform to their preferred suppliers via application programming interfaces to create customized business travel ecosystems to meet corporate requirements.
“The level of innovation from our Business Travel Innovator competitors this year responded to the new challenges and demands emerging for post-pandemic travel,” said BTN Group executive vice president and group publisher Louis Magliaro. “We were excited to see these incredible concepts still flowing into business travel, and we look forward to seeing where new and increasingly creative problem-solvers will take the industry.”
He added, “The event atmosphere and participant attitudes showed how resilient business travel is and that we are poised for a great comeback.”
Additional participants in the Innovation Faceoff included Bizly, Blacklane, FCM, HRS, Hubli, PredictX, Tripbam, U.S. Bank/TravelBank.
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