Orbitz For Business VP Sees Value In Visa Partnership

As business functions become increasingly automated, corporate travel expense management remains a key area for data intelligence and payments systems to work hand in hand with an eye on boosting efficiency (and margins). Charles Bacharach, VP of Sales at Orbitz for Business, spoke to PYMNTS about his company’s pairing with Visa to help mid-sized enterprises track and control corporate travel expenses.

You recently announced your partnership with Visa to provide travel managers with a more efficient way of managing travel expense payouts. Could you tell us what’s unique about that new solution?

CB: What we’ve done in partnering with Visa is in essence providing a fully managed travel booking solution, combined with their commercial payment vehicle and an expense management application. In essence, it presents a small business customer a one-stop shop for being able to manage the process of buying, paying for and getting reimbursed for travel expenses [and] corporate travel expenses.

This will be called the Visa Travel Manager, targeted to the small [and] mid-size business. The market strategy is to employ the issuing banks as the sales channel for this new offering, as they have the relationships with their corporate clients. They’re already issuing the Visa card and bringing some value-added capabilities in the form of our managed travel portal.

What was the primary driver behind the partnership — and now that it’s in place, what do you see Orbitz clients do that they couldn’t before?

CB: I think that the driver behind the partnership was Visa was looking to bring some additional value add to their issuing banks and to bring value add to their payment vehicle — and with travel being typically the top two or three controllable expenses a company has, they were really looking to bring a package solution to that small marketplace.

And they went out and evaluated the marketplace and saw what Orbitz for Business was doing with our express product, which we’ve been successfully selling into the space now for the last three and a half years. They saw the ability to bring something really configurable and available in a matter of days to their marketplace and to their issuing bank’s customers.

I think what this allows the marketplace to do, what they couldn’t do before, is really be able to enjoy all the attributes of a … solution that typically, from a price point or resource or implementation perspective, was prohibitive for a small business to bring in-house.

What we’re able to do is, given the innovation and the automation we’ve brought to this process, is we took that section of the marketplace that’s been terribly underserved.

Let’s talk about mobile. How do you think it’s disrupting the travel management industry, and what role is Orbitz for Business going to play in moving that forward?

Well, we did see mobile playing a significant factor in how people want to engage in buying travel.

We certainly see that trend in our consumer brands and we continue to see it with our corporate customers, so Orbitz for Business provided a fully enabled mobile capability to allow customers to, in essence, extend their booking portal out to the mobile device where they can book air, hotel and car rental fully in policy, fully in rules and enjoy access to a negotiated rate.

We’ve been at the forefront of really pushing the mobile component. And we had that insight and intelligence based upon our relationship with our consumer brands where we’re seeing a lot of the kind of leading edge thinking taking place in the consumer end of the market.

We’re seeing a significant increase in the use of the mobile devices in our client base and fully expect that to continue to grow as the devices become more and more apparent out in the marketplace. We’re not fussed by smartphone or tablet, they’re all the same to us.

What do you believe are the most significant advancements in travel management solutions in the past five years and how do you expect it to evolve moving forward, maybe over the next five years?

CB: The greatest advantage seems, really, the shift from travel being an offline agent-centric component to really being more of a self-service and online component. Certainly mobile has been a major proponent in making that shift.

But I also think that the marketplace is recognizing that the consumerization of corporate offerings is very important — doesn’t matter what the application is, whether it’s in travel management or if it’s in other procurement categories — people are fully expecting to have a very similar experience with corporate tools as they do with the tools they’re using for their own personal experience.

I would say it’s really that shift from the offline to the online, the consumerization of an offering, including the mobile offering. I think the other big issue is the industry is getting more sophisticated in terms of its use of data and its use of analytics, and I think the harvesting of big data to get further insight into program performance will be a trend that is what is now — and well into the future — and I think ultimately as the industry gets smarter about how they use big data, really being able to get in some predictive analytics in terms of being able to predict what your travel program can do based upon harvesting and analyzing that data.

This creates the opportunity for some further personalization. You know, travel is one of those things where it’s both a corporate necessity but it’s also personal to people, so I think the ability for travel management companies to innovate and use data to help personalize the experience of still maintaining the rules and regulations associated with policy and policy compliance will be trends that we will see for a long time.

Once you’re [on a] trip and you’re in a specific location, I think there will be some real innovative things coming out in terms of really being able to provide localized tools and capabilities inside and information as the traveler is actually en route.