Christopherson Business Travel Retools For Stronger Customer Bonds
Jay Campbell | The Company Dime | July 22, 2024
Salt Lake City’s Christopherson Business Travel released a new iOS app in the first phase of a digital platform reinvention using the brand Andavo. The app supports loyalty program and profile updates, trip sharing and planning with colleagues, “real-time” synced itineraries and FlightAware flight status.
“There’s a lot of evolution going on right now in the TMC industry,” said Christopherson CEO Mike Cameron during a briefing last week. “You’ve got all the new players — the Navans, Spotnanas and TravelPerks and others — that are coming at things through the lens of a modern tech company. And then you’ve got all of us legacy players that have the history of professional services. We want to be like them, they want to be like us, and we’re all trying to figure out how to do what the customers want us to do, which is provide them a solution that’s modern and works.”
Foundational to Christopherson’s cloud-native, omnichannel, API-first vision is a developer portal providing “access and documentation to custom application programming interfaces for clients to conveniently access their travel-related data and for developers to build custom integrations.”
Examples of deeper integration with clients go beyond traditional human resources and risk management feeds. One customer pulls its trip data in to be displayed in an employee management application. Another is tying it in with a proprietary scheduling system for road shows, according to Christopherson leaders.
“We don’t need to integrate to Delta Air Lines,” said Josh Cameron, Christopherson Business Travel’s chief strategy officer. “That’s what the GDS can do. We’d rather take our capital and go build customer experiences that further and more deeply integrate our customers with their data.” Christopherson uses Sabre’s and Travelport’s GDSs.
The TMC’s digital approach is organized through three core experiences: administrator — that is, the travel manager, evolving from the former AirPortal 360, initially through a desktop and later a mobile interface — a travel advisor desktop and the traveler.
The traveler app represents a shift away from SAP Concur’s TripIt app, which offers some features only through a paid version. Concur Travel remains one of CBT’s two online booking tools, along with Travelport’s Deem. Both will be accessible via the mobile app. An Android version is on the way.
As the vision was coming together, the Camerons spent a couple of years recruiting chief technology officer Chad Maughan, a former tech leader at the company who had been outside of the industry for a dozen years. He rejoined in September 2023 after 10 years as principal engineer and then director of engineering at business intelligence company Domo following two years as senior software engineer at the LDS Church. Maughan was with Christopherson as a software engineer from 1998 to 2011.
An early engineer at Domo, Maughan ultimately had the opportunity to lead teams in innovation, identity and access management, search, alerting, predictive analytics and APIs.
“We were processing petabytes of data — just an obscene amount of data — and then trying to do really interesting things with it,” said Maughan. “Travel is a data-rich environment. Travel kind of had the early adopter’s curse. Much like finance, they were early adopters [of technology]. I think it’s back, especially with generative AI and the opportunities there. A service industry, a high amount of data, context. There’s a massive wave and that opportunity is what really brought me back.
“In the 12 years since I was gone, the services and the APIs and such have just become so much better,” Maughan said. “Travelport has really done an incredible job with their new suite of APIs. Part of what’s powering this is their new hotel booking APIs. And then [ATPCo’s] Routehappy data is really good. You have to have a central integration point to be able to augment all this data to make it a really rich experience.”
In follow-up written comments, Josh Cameron explained that the Andavo platform will provide “data and context” to power AI use cases. Those include producing “relevant shopping results” for agents, predicting schedule changes and improving service levels and rate assurance. That work is in addition to a pilot underway with Amgine to use AI for boosting productivity within Christopherson’s meetings and events division.
Christopherson books about $750 million in travel annually for corporate, university, humanitarian, luxury and meetings customers.
______________
Before starting The Company Dime with David Jonas in 2014, journalist Jay Campbell a decade earlier created travel business newsletter The Beat. In 2006, Jay co-founded Travel Procurement magazine and in 2010 helped integrate them with Business Travel News. He served as BTN's editorial director until 2013. Jay made his travel industry media debut in 1993 at the Air Travel Journal of Boston while earning his undergraduate degree in journalism at Boston University. He would be happy to connect on LinkedIn. He's here at CorporateTravel.social on Mastodon.