A travel management tech start-up launches today and claims it will unpick a 60-year old ecosystem and reinvent it.
TripStax says it will give TMCs “unprecedented access to high-end, well-established, but also affordable, travel management solutions”.
Although the TripStax name is new to the sector, its technology has been developed over the last 25 years by ATPI as its own travel management technology platform.
Last year, the ATPI executive team decided to create a separate business, TripStax Technologies Ltd, to release the technology to a wider audience.
The move was led by Jack Ramsey, who joined ATPI in August 2020 as Investment Officer after more than eight years at Travelport.
He is now CEO of the company, which employs more than 90 people worldwide.
TripStax is a fully-connected modular stack of eight proprietary travel tech tools – Analytics, Approve, Content, Docs, Mobile, Portal, Profile, and Track.
Its key differentiator is that the modules are powered by ‘The Core’, an “engine room” which “consumes, enriches and manages” traveller profile, booking and financial data from TripStax modules and from elsewhere, including GDS, NDC and LCC aggregators and direct NDC connections to multiple airlines.
Ramsey said TripStax has been designed to redefine a B2B travel tech that’s too fragmented, burdensome and costly for small to mid-size TMCs.
He said while most legacy travel technology companies charge TMCs a fee every time data is stored and transposed by each vendor, TMCs using TripStax are only charged once for the ingestion of booking, profile or finance data, regardless of how many times that data is processed within one of the modules in the stack.
“We want to help TMCs keep up with the tech-lead rivals without them having to reduce their margins to a point where they have to close shop,” said Ramsey.
“TripStax gives them a premium and proven tech stack that ordinarily wouldn’t be available to them because it would be financially prohibitive to invest in or develop themselves.
“Our vision is to empower mid- to small-scale TMCs to level the playing field.”
TMCs can start off by implementing The Core and subscribe to their choice of modules, then scale up by adding further modules. Once data is flowing through The Core, adding extra modules will maximise cost savings.
For corporate buyers, TripStax promises to bring better consistency of data across any application and better analytics, reporting and predictive analytics to give insights into corporate travel spend, buying behaviours, policy adherence and support in travel programme design and maintenance.
TripStax already has a significant customer base, including ATPI as its flagship TMC client and a major TMC in North America currently implementing its technology.
Ramsey said TripStax is also close to finalising agreements with TMCs in multiple European markets, including the UK.
He said the company isn’t just looking at organic growth but is planning to grow through acquisitions, with two possible purchases currently in the pipeline.
