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Business travelers took one step closer to handling every last bit of their corporate trips in app thanks to Trippeo's big news.
Via a press release, Trippeo unveiled that it now offers the ability for travelers to book flights through its expense management dashboard.
Patrick Tsang, Trippeo's chief technology officer, offered the following on the news: "This release tips the scales for Trippeo: we've taken our app and further streamlined the procedures that an organization needs to keep their employees productive and compliant."
The corporate travel expense management app celebrated accordingly on social media as well:
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Now through one simple channel, potential travelers can settle what has become a headache for many throughout the industry.
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The release echoes the sentiment: "Flights for Trippeo centralizes travel policy enforcement and itinerary management, eliminating costly mistakes and wasted time. Travel and expense is now combined in one elegant and affordable solution."
Thankfully, we were able to touch base with Adarsh Pallian, Trippeo's CEO. Pallian took a few questions and delved into the various aspects of this particular release. Pallian also piqued our interest on other updates that may come in the future.
First, here is a brief video that will introduce the uninitiated to the budding app that continues to evolve to the market it serves:
TravelPulse: What was the impetus that led to the inclusion of such a helpful innovation like flight booking?
Adarsh Pallian: Flight booking has always been central to Trippeo's product roadmap. This new launch gives finance admins and travel coordinators the ability to set travel policies that help curb and manage corporate travel spend. We found that our customers always had to use two solutions to track expenses - one for day to day receipt tracking and reporting and another for booking flights.
With Trippeo Flights, we've eliminated the need to manually process bookings one by one on different OTAs that aren't compliant with the company travel policy. Forgoing those expensive and labour-intensive processes means that organizations can count on reduced transaction costs, streamlined systems-overhead, and guaranteed adherence to travel policies. In addition, all corporate discounts and negotiations are built into the booking platform, providing optimum savings.
TP: Where do you see the business travel industry headed in the next five years as far as corporate expensing apps and innovations?
AP: We're just getting started! Corporate expensing apps have traditionally been slow to innovate. No matter how big the company, their solution is still very manual. You have to take photos of receipts, create reports, send them to finance and wait for the reimbursement to arrive in a few weeks. The millennial generation doesn't have the time or the patience for this. Like, in five years, we'll be laughing at the way we do expenses today.
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We here at Trippeo imagine a world full of automation with machine-learning bots that can predict your travel schedule based on your calendar, emails or chats (think Slack) and automatically suggest trips for you (flight and hotel booking), as well as track all on-the-go expenses during the trip-all with a no-touch approach from the user. The last thing we want is for our customers to open the Trippeo app to track expenses manually. Watch our space for more updates on automation in the coming months.
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TP: Now you rolled out flight booking, what does Trippeo have in store for the remainder of the year or beyond?
AP: Flight booking just scratches the surface - we're rolling out real-time flight tracking next along with a few surprises that changes the way you travel.
TP: What, if any, partnerships do you see coming from flight booking being offered on Trippeo?
AP: Flight booking opens up some interesting opportunities for us to work with some of our competitors in the AP, Payroll and Expense Management space. We have some more announcements coming shortly about this in the next few months. I wish I could say more now, but until then... stay tuned!
TP: Lastly, are there any other things you feel our readers should know about Trippeo and its latest update?
AP: We're very excited to get this out in the wild. When we began Trippeo we knew that flights would add a new echelon of control for CFOs and finance teams alike. This is the first in a series of updates we have planned to extend Trippeo beyond the expense management realm. I want Trippeo to set the standard for our industry. This release marks the beginning of that.
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