When Tripbam took home the trophy at BTN’s inaugural Innovate conference in 2014, it did so as a two-year-old tech startup bent on reducing the prices corporates pay for their hotel programs. Tripbam’s bread-and-butter offering, as founder and CEO Steve Reynolds calls it, was and still is its hotel shopping tool, which continuously queries rates at a single property or within a geographic cluster in order to capture any drops in prices leading up to a hotel stay. The company has by no means slipped into obscurity since then.
Tripbam leveraged its early partnerships with influential corporate clients—including Anthem’s Cindy Heston, as well as smaller agencies like Hickory Global Partners and Dallas-based TravelSolutions by Campbell—to form larger agency deals and sign additional clients. Late in 2014, the company signed a reseller agreement with BCD Travel. Tripbam also piloted with its first 20 corporate accounts and implemented its first corporate direct client relationship that year.
In 2015, it struck reseller deals with American Express Global Business Travel and U.K.-based Business Travel Direct. That same year, Tripbam’s hotel-shopping tool, geared at finding savings, found a new application, as procurement professionals used the large volume of data Tripbam generated during its frequent hotel shops to strengthen their positions during hotel rate negotiations. The data also directly highlighted a previously unmeasurable issue in the hotel industry around last-room-availability agreements and hoteliers’ frequent failures to honor them.
In 2016, Tripbam released its Tripbam Analytics suite of visual tools for travel managers, which built on its prior procurement applications to track additional metrics, such as the overall increase or decrease in commissions as different rate types are found and rebooked; the improvement in corporate hotel compliance; and which travelers cost or save the most money for the program. It also introduced multiple languages and currencies to support global accounts, integrated with email parsing and application programming interface tool Traxo to capture direct bookings and signed a referral agreement with Carlson Wagonlit Travel.
Last year, Tripbam opened a London office to serve EMEA, appointing travel industry vet Peter Grover to oversee it. The company also signed a reseller agreement with HRG, formed a partnership with guest feedback platform TrustYou to improve its hotel clusters and signed its 25th Fortune 100 corporate client.
Now, Tripbam is exploring partnerships with hotels to become to the industry what Prism is to airlines. However, no agreements have yet been made public.