Virtual travel assistant Pana—co-founded by Devon Tivona, Lianne Haug and Sam Felsenthal—combines artificial intelligence and a team of agents to manage travel. Through a chat interface, users can book trips and manage additions, changes and disruptions to existing itineraries. The user pool consists largely of travelers outside managed corporate programs, but Tivona said that could soon change.
How does Pana work, from the traveler's perspective?
If you've already made bookings, you can forward those to us, and we get those added to your itinerary. If you haven't, we spend a little time getting to know you, your price sensitivity and your preferred airlines, and we can recommend bookings to you. If you like any of the options we send over to you, you can book directly in the app, and you immediately get a confirmation email from us. We, in that case, are your agent of record. Then, you have 24/7 access to chat. We sometimes proactively reach out to you, say a flight delay or cancellation occurs or you land in a city and we think you want restaurant recommendations. Or, you have the opportunity to reach out to us, [say] you're a salesperson and need to stay with a client an extra day, you just need to text and say you need your trip extended an extra day. We make a change to a flight, a rental car and a hotel. What would have been, in a managed travel situation, clicking through a bunch of interfaces and potentially calling your TMC and, in an unmanaged travel situation, a complete nightmare of navigating through 10 different travel websites now has become as simple as sending a text message.
How does that "getting to know you" process work?
We have a standard set of questions everyone is asked at the beginning. We have a bunch of different ways we can ask those questions. For our members, we offer the option to start that interaction with a 20-minute phone call. That's something we offer only on some of our higher-cost plans, but there are also questionnaires you can fill out. We're coming out with a conversational way to get the questions answered pretty quickly. As you travel with us and we get to know you, your profile gets filled in more. Today, we collect about 450 potential different data points for that traveler, and those data points are used to customize the experience moving forward.
Where do you get your content?
We're plugged directly into the GDS.
Why did you opt for a chat interface for the app?
It's a medium that can be both synchronous and asynchronous. You can send a message, step into a meeting and come back and have work done for you. Or, when things get hairy, you can send a message and go back and forth with an agent quickly via chat. It is the only medium today that is extremely readable, understandable, parse-able and actionable for humans and machines. There's an opportunity to augment human chat conversation through additional work that a machine is doing, whether that is a machine intelligence delivering example responses an agent can reply with or an agent dashboard that's reconfiguring itself based upon the context of the conversation going on. Through this interface, we might be able to scale-ably provide amazing customer service at a very low cost.
Where does managed corporate travel fall into your strategy?
Our primary way of selling our product is through a monthly subscription, $19 a month or $199 a year. The majority of our customers are unmanaged customers who are looking for some additional support. We also have a teams product that adds on some lightweight reporting, policy control and team management. That essentially is for unmanaged teams who would like to employ Pana across their entire organization and need some of those features that managed travel provides. Increasingly, we're starting to investigate and spend time in understanding how Pana operates in the managed travel realm, whether that's alongside a travel management company and alongside an online booking tool like Concur or, potentially—and we haven't dove deep here yet—what Pana as a travel management replacement looks like.
What sort of usage are you seeing now?
We launched out of private beta in April of this year. [After some media publicity] we went from a couple hundred beta testers to today thousands of users. This test in unmanaged travel has taught us a lot, and we're excited about that opportunity now, but more, we're keeping our eyes open in how we can add value in the managed travel space, and that's where we're spending a lot of time learning, investigating and talking to people right now. The growth we've seen so far has been phenomenal, but we see a much faster and much more exciting growth trajectory in managed travel.