Since being named the People’s Choice winner in 2016, mobile flight rebooking app Freebird has significantly built up its clientele and partnerships in the corporate space. The app now has more than 150 corporate clients live across about 10 travel management companies, including Adelman, Omega World Travel and Travel Leaders Corporate, said CEO and co-founder Ethan Bernstein. In February, Freebird was among the nine launch partners announced for BCD Travel’s third-party technology marketplace SolutionSource. In all, the app is on track to serve more than 250,000 travelers this year.
“We are growing phenomenally fast, and feedback is absolutely through the roof from our corporate travelers and from the travel managers who control the policy and programs,” Bernstein said. “Our renewal rate is 100 percent at this point, and our client retention rate is around 98 or 99 percent.” The gap owes to attrition from TMC resellers of Freebird.
The high satisfaction levels are impressive, Bernstein said, when taking into account that Freebird users are, by design, stressed or angry when putting the app into action. Freebird’s predictive analytics and airline-agnostic, in-app rebooking capability ends what Bernstein calls the “doom cycle” when delays or cancellations seem imminent. By using the app, travelers do not have to constantly hit refresh on their phones, obsessively check weather reports or watch over their shoulders for quickly forming lines. Instead, they can get work done, grab a bite to eat, use the restroom or do the other tasks they would do during normal travel situations, he said.
Having operated in corporate channels for about 10 months at this point, Bernstein said his favorite corporate client success stories are those in which use of the app saved a major deal. For example, one client in New York needed to travel to Arkansas in January, when Winter Storm Inga prompted the traveler’s flight to be canceled. The app found a nonstop flight that got the traveler to Arkansas in time for the meeting, while the airline’s offer arrived four hours later and included a layover. “Their ability to move quickly and switch airlines onto a nonstop flight saved their meeting and the multimillion-dollar deal they were working on,” Bernstein said. The travel manager came back to us and said, ‘Our entire program was paid for on this one trip.’”
Next up, Freebird is eyeing expansion into international flights. That’s the most frequent request Bernstein fields, and it’s tentatively penciled in for next year, he said. “We’re continuing to focus on the U.S. domestic market to grow our penetration and continue to perfect the offering, but going forward, we’re going to look beyond our borders,” Bernstein said. “We’re starting to think about how to do that responsibly and in a way that preserves duty of care and is proving beneficial to travelers and travel programs.”