The rise of remote-working across the globe has triggered an urgent need for the digital transformation of corporate travel management worldwide. The corporate travel market in 2017 was valued at a whopping US$1.23 trillion.
The co-founders of TroopTravel are perfect examples of the new tech era of business globalization. Dennis Vilovic is based in Spain and Leonard Cremer is based in South Africa. Both remotely manage a virtual office of three full-time employees and a pool of freelance contractors.
Indeed, the escalating demand for virtual offices, multi-trips and corporate group travel resources are inevitably pushing in-house management systems to near breaking point.
Launched in 2017, TroopTravel is using Big Data and machine learning technology to produce more efficient group travel planning systems, freeing personnel to get on with the real business of making money for their companies.
Tapping into a travel sector that was technologically outdated and inadequate to the needs of modern-day business, TroopTravel has gained international recognition in less than a year. A series of validations and MVP development were conducted after its soft launch in 2017. In early 2018, the alpha platform was officially marketed to the industry, with several multinational clients coming on board. The MNCs have operations in 210 countries with combined revenues of over US$320 billion.
Backed by seed funding from six angel investors and non-equity assistance finance from ENISA, TroopTravel will launch its full commercial product at the London Business Travel Show (BTS) in February 2019.
In an exclusive interview with CompassList at the South Summit 2018 in Spain, Dennis Vilovic reveals the business strategies for TroopTravel.
How did you come up with the idea of TroopTravel?
Have you ever tried to bring a group of people together, coming from different locations? You know how difficult that is? That’s essentially what we’re doing. We’re a platform that connects a lot of data and compounds everything together. We’re a Big Data analytics company currently focusing on the B2B corporate travel sector.
We actually started as B2C. The funny thing is that I used to live in Africa and somehow I was coming to Spain and my best friend lives in Germany, so I wanted to get this chance to meet up with him. We wanted to meet somewhere between Spain and Germany, so we went on the internet to search for a location to meet. In the end, we met in Milan, but we had to research and compare everything manually! That’s how we started, we saw a potential gap in the market.
We started to develop the very first version of the platform to bring together private groups of people. In 2017, we attended the Web Summit in Lisbon and an Indian guy approached us, asking if we could provide this service for his company. It turned out that his company was composed of 180,000 people around the world. That’s when I realized there was a real business opportunity within the corporate travel space. That’s when we started to move from B2C to B2B.
How did you and Mr Cremer know each other? Had you worked together before?
I was in a network of entrepreneurs working for a global organization. I was hired to do business development, but since the members were from all over the world, I was mostly busy organizing these kinds of trips. Once I did one trip to Bangkok with a group of entrepreneurs, and I was talking to one entrepreneur from South Africa; telling him how inefficient this process of bringing all these people together was. I mean I’m German, so I like efficiency.
The entrepreneur from South Africa working in the tech sector offered to have a look into it. He started to look into the technology and two weeks later he called, “Dennis, I think there is something in your idea.” Today he’s my co-founder. That’s how we met: first in Bangkok and so far, we have met seven times in person. Everything else happens virtually.
What are the opportunities and challenges you encountered in disrupting a conservative sector?
In the beginning, the biggest challenge was that big industry players didn’t take us seriously as we’re pretty small. I remember I went to a trade fair in Madrid and I wanted to meet up with Iberia’s managers. I went to their stand asking for a meeting with someone, they asked me if I had an appointment and once I said no they told me to go away. At the start, it’s very difficult to get access to these big guys but then there are many other ways of building a product.
Big corporates are now more open, they like what we do. We are now working with one of the biggest MNC clients to date. The opportunity for us is that companies do actually see that there is a need for innovation. There’s still a lot of space to innovate in the business travel sector in general. Big players with all these technologies are still big companies that are not as agile as startups.
What are TroopTravel's income model and business growth to date?
We launched our alpha platform in June and, as of today, we are working with 22 global clients that represent about 600,000 people around the world. These clients are currently using the platform for free, in exchange for analytics and feedback.
We will be charging fees per analysis. We are aiming to build a marketplace which connects nearly any type of travel service. We are offering these services to corporates free-of-charge because we are interested in earning fees from affiliates.
TroopTravel works on an open-API system, how have you built a network of quality-checked and trusted partners?
The open-APIs are all market services that are all well known, for example, Uber, Skyscanner etc. You can actually select which kind of service you want to activate for your travel program. The idea is that anyone can connect their services to our platform, but it’s ultimately up to the user to decide which service supplier they want to use.
In the corporate world right now, it's hard to access innovation. There are a lot of amazing proposals out there, but all of these normally require a complete change in the technology platform to a different one. What we are doing at TroopTravel is basically connecting the dots: we allow different tech companies and startups to provide their solutions and connect them to our platform; then the travel manager can decide which market service they want to use.
You won three competitions in a row: The Business Travel Show in London, The Amadeus Hackathon in Madrid and the Avalanche Startup Competition in Romania. What are the technical aspects that differentiate you from the competition?
I think we are using the latest technologies, and we are integrating many Google services that are actually adding a lot of value to our product. The real excitement actually comes through the concept of what we are doing. None of us come from the travel industry, what we are doing just seems logical. Apparently, players in the industry do not look logically on how to solve problems and they get stuck. To complement everything else, we got industry experts as advisors on board.
What will be your expansion strategy in the future?
Currently, 50% of our clients are based in the US, the remaining 50% in Europe and we have one more client in Australia. Interestingly, we have no clients in Spain, which is strange considering that our office is based there. That’s also one of the reasons why we are here at the South Summit today - to raise awareness.
Our approach now is to focus on group travel planning and then potentially, at a later stage, corporate travel in general. We are still in the planning phase. We currently have multinational corporations with employees distributed across the world. We also work with not-for-profit organizations with smaller teams of perhaps 10 people. Since we are charging per analysis, it doesn’t matter; everyone can use the system when they want, even if they just run one analysis per year.
We are basically targeting any group of people or companies that have employees in different locations across the world.
Asian markets are expected to drive the demand for corporate travel management in the following years. Are you planning to expand your business there, will you be attending any travel-related events in Asia?
We recently attended an event in Singapore organized by the Association of Corporate Travel Executives (ACT), and there was a lot of interest in our product. So yes, the Asian market is very interesting for us.
