The tech behind the business traveller

Neil Markey, SVP Product & Chief Information Officer, Deem, talks about their company’s solutions for the business traveller and their efforts to make the experience as seamless and painless as possible.

Giving a better travel experience to customers

We're currently servicing more than 50,000 corporations in 61 countries and 15 languages. When corporations send their employees on business travel, we provide the platform that they log into to search and find flights, hotels, car rentals and ground transportation. More than 42.9 million individual bookings have taken place on our platform and more than 2.5 million unique travellers.

We are heavily focused on becoming more than an online booking tool. Now when the customer queries, say they get back to list of 200 hotels and 200 flights. They have to spend a lot of time trying to figure out what's relevant to them. That's time taken away from the employee from doing company work. We’ll look at data related to the individual from previous trips and corporate policies to provide recommendations. You may also not even have go to the website soon and do painful searches as we can integrate it with whatever tools you are using like Slack, Siri or Alexa. It should all be sorted out within a matter of minutes instead of probably spending an hour plus.

Going from your current terminal to another terminal in the airport or getting you access to the nearest lounge, we could guide you fully using Augmented Reality in the future. We could even automatically book an alternate flight if your current flight delay makes you miss a connecting flight. We want to create a travel experience management, where the right time, we're providing the right contextual recommendations to the traveller to make their experience as seamless and painless as possible.

You might like flying on a particular airline or you might like sitting in the front of the plane in either an aisle or window seat. We factor those rules in on top of your individual preferences as a user, the data mining component of it. We're just starting to scratch the surface in terms of where we can actually go with that. We want to provide the best possible experience to you when you're on that trip. It can be from how do you get from the airport to the office or to hotel, to if you are like particular concert, and they're playing—recommendations and ticket booking can be integrated in the experience.

Collaborating with other organizations

Sabre is a provider that we work with, along with Apollo and Amadeus. They are basically the storage mechanisms for the travel itineraries, and also for all the records and the data around flights and hotel fees, etc. We source content in from approximately 100 different providers. Some of that can be from vendors like North Star and Booking.com for hotel content. It can be from Southwest Airlines for their flight details. We integrate with all of the large systems and the vast majority of the travel management corporations and airlines through a direct connect mechanism.

The policy configuration engine

The value add that we provide on top is basically with an intelligence booking platform for use by corporations and their employees. It’s our most critical component, our policy configuration engine. This is where the corporations go in and they can set up the rules. What users are allowed to fly on what class or service on airlines, what hotel chains they're allowed to book; what class of car rental they're allowed to have? Are they allowed to have black car or ride hail transportation.

All of that gets factored in and ran as a policy engine on top of any of the recommendations that come back. When we display back to the traveller we’re not just displaying the basic search results. We're ranking them based off on the company policy. We're also flagging to the end user flights and hotels that are in policy and even others that are out of policy. But we add in extra capabilities on top in terms of approval process. So if an employee wants to book a trip and it's slightly out of policy, we can configure that to go through first level-second level management for review and approval. When it gets approval we submitted it for ticketing.

Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing

We are creating a centre of excellence in Bangalore. We’ll be focusing on core software development of our next generation platform. We're rebuilding the entire core on the microservices architecture. We're moving into the latest technologies, we're going to be using Java. We will be in a hybrid cloud model for quite a while. We've been working very extensively with AWS and Google.

AI-ML will be a core component of the next generation platform. That will enhance the experience to the end user. We have a Facebook virtual assistant, a proof of concept. But we expect to expand that out now across all the surfaces and making it more sophisticated in calculating NLP. Actually when you look at AI-ML, the travel industry is a little bit behind on where it should be from a technology perspective.

I'm always very careful about using the terminology AI. I much prefer ML. We're not talking about a robot that is actually better than a human that could actually outperform us. We're talking about how we use data in order to understand the individual better. The whole concept around AI and the Hollywood areas of that, from my perspective is like bad coding. We're not really doing AI but making use of the data in order to provide extra value to the traveller.

Taking care of security and privacy

We do not use the cloud today for storage of any data, whether it's around a company or an individual. We actually have our own data centres within which everything is stored with our own dedicated operations and security. Security is absolutely critical. We are providing the transportation options for Fortune 500 corporations. We have their employees PII (Personally Identifiable Information) data and travel information. We absolutely have to make sure that it is fully secure so we go through multiple compliance audits to ensure that our security is top notch. Privacy has become a huge thing. Privacy is number one of the concern of our clients. We have multiple audits from our customers. We have aligned with GDPR accordingly.