Travelport Locomote, Sydney, Australia
Name of Organization / Company: Travelport Locomote, Sydney, Australia
Category: Award for the Innovation in Technology Development > All Other Industries
Entry Title: Travelport Locomote — Innovation in Technology
Entry:
Travelport Locomote has flipped a traditional model on its head, by making corporate travel brilliantly simple.
This innovative technology helps companies reduce the cost and time taken to manage travel, by providing a unique platform that does everything from planning, approving and booking travel, while enabling duty of care and traveller safety – all from one place.
Flipping the model
The traditional travel program focusses largely on the booking element and ignores the majority of the travel experience. This makes it almost impossible to drive positive changes and satisfy the increasingly sophisticated demands of stakeholders. The traditional model also promotes offline bookings, which drive up costs and creates inefficiencies.
When you flip the model:
● Everything is in one central location
● The time taken to plan, book and approve travel is reduced
● Travellers have more control
● Bookings can be made on any device, at any time
● You can leverage what’s working and deliver insights into what can be improved
● You can build custom workflows
● Communication can be instant and within the platform
● There is a full audit trail of interactions for every trip
● Integrations can be created with partners and suppliers
All of this leads to increased adoption and compliance, enhanced duty of care and traveller safety, cost savings and efficiencies.
To provide the best experience for users, Travelport Locomote integrates the widest variety of travel content and data: this includes everything from risk data to visa and health advisory, tax requirements to car rental, and much more. A vast array of business logic and workflows are integrated within the platform to ensure that travellers can make bookings quickly and easily on devices of their choice (all while remaining compliant to their company’s travel policy).
Travelport Locomote also allows its customers to benefit from price and service comparison services (everything from airline products and attributes, to car rental and hotel prices). All of this data is made available to Travelport Locomote’s customers through the Travelport e-Commerce Platform that aggregates content from the world’s leading travel providers.
A great tool creates great results
Credit Union Australia, has noted that since using the platform, their costs have been reduced by more than 30%. Another customer, World Vision, has seen average approval times for international travel fall from 30 days to just 5 days. Using data and software to provide this level of business success to customers is what sets Travelport Locomote apart.
From start up to world beater
A lot has changed for Travelport Locomote since July 2015. Until November 2016, the business was known simply as Locomote. However following Travelport’s acquisition, the business changed its name to Travelport Locomote. The Travelport investment enabled many of the product innovations. An example of this is the recent integration with Travelport SmartPoint, which is the Point Of Sale Desktop used by Travel Management Companies (TMC’s), allowing travel agents to service and ticket bookings for travellers. This allows a travel consultant the ability to stay within their platform and interact with Travelport Locomote seamlessly increasing their efficiency dramatically.
User experience is at the heart of everything Travelport Locomote has achieved over the past 18 months. A focus on simplicity leads to a highly usable and intuitive platform which is easy for customers to use. Travelport Locomote has collaborated with users, designers and developers to deliver features that solve real business problems and deliver exceptional customer service.
In early 2017, Travelport Locomote launched in the UK and there are big plans for more country launches over the next 12 months. These countries will join Australia, New Zealand and part of South East Asia benefitting from this disruptive technology. The future looks bright for this brilliantly simple, corporate travel solution.
Supporting Links:
http://www.afr.com/technology/travelport-acquires-majority-share-in-aussie-startup-locomote-20151126-gl8ow3
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/companies/corporate-travel-startup-locomote-establishes-uk-office/news-story/dd5e3b50634dc2302cf201f90bf96061
https://www.mybusiness.com.au/technology/2684-we-slashed-our-travel-cost...
http://www.locomote.com/