Leading travel companies are transitioning from building their own new products and services to building software platforms that enable travel startups and 3rd party companies to connect and tap into to their sales systems.
Platforms are helping travel companies sell more than they could by selling on their own.
In the past if a travel company wanted to expand their business the option was either to build the product or acquire it by buying another travel company. A more efficient, quicker and possibly more profitable model is to license 3rd party products and services through APIs. In this new evolving business model your company can be generating revenue in a few weeks to one-two months.
Platforms and APIs speed up the sales process enabling the platform company to drive growth quicker with less risk.
Platforms are being conceived right now by the worlds most trusted travel brands and executed by the smartest players in the room.
Sam Shank the founder of Hotel Tonight gave a recent talk at Phocuswright. The backside of his presentation a “Hotel Stay from the Future” included how he envisioned the perfect hotel mobile booking experience and what he thinks it could look like.
His vision for the perfect mobile hotel booking experience looks like a travel platform with multiple partners integrating into the platform with their APIs.
I can’t speak for Sam but don’t think for a moment that he and his team are not thinking about how Hotel Tonight can become a platform to provide a hotel guest a total end-to-end customer experience.
I recently attended the Concur’s DevCon conference in San Francisco. Steve Singh’s presentation was an eye opener. The depth of his thinking and the extent of how big Concur’s platform can really be was truly amazing.
Concur has an open platform focused on transforming the travel industry and providing value to business travelers. Travel companies that have products and services that business travelers would be interested in can get distribution for their product through the App Center. Concur is facilitating the ability for 3rd party travel companies to plugin and gain access to Concur’s 25M business travelers.
Sabre’s Dev Studio is commercializing their technology by providing their APIs to get distributed and integrated into 3rd party travel businesses and new products and services. The Sabre Red App Centre is a B2B marketplace that enables travel companies around the world to make their apps available to travel agents. This is a similar model to Concur’s App Center.
Partner Fusion one of my clients and some of the smartest online travel marketers in the world are building Travel Pass, a platform to sell travel direct to consumers integrating multiple travel APIs.
FlitWays one of the Travel Startup Incubator portfolio companies has an API to provide ground transportation services for travel companies that want to integrate transportation for their customers. FlitWays can be integrated into Homeaway, Hotel Tonight and Sabre’s Dev Studio. FlitWays is currently considering integrating with Concur.
Homeaway recently announced that they are integrating Gogobot, Uber and Instacart into the vacation rental marketplace to improve the guest experience and provide multiple services for vacationers. From the sounds of this announcement it seems as if Homeaway is moving towards developing a platform.
Proxce one of the Travel Startup Incubator portfolio companies will have an API coming out of Beta testing that will enable OTAs and travel companies the ability to provide their guests to automatically check-in to hotels.
Finally at TravelStartups.co we are moving towards building a global platform for travel startups to raise seed capital, get advisement and mentoring, do business development deals, network with founders, acquire follow-on capital and pitch to investors. We envision one-day the ability for travel startups to plugin to our platform to help build their business from idea-to-launch of their startup to IPO.