A fresh user interface is launched at the Business Travel Show this February.
LONDON – Traveldoo, the travel and expense technology company from Expedia Group, is set to launch a new user interface for their online booking tool (OBT) at the Business Travel Show in London, promising better usability, fresh looks and a consistent experience across travel booking and expense management. Traveldoo is also preparing several key updates: seamless usability, NDC integration and optical character recognition (OCR) technology for expense receipt capture.
New UI
The Traveldoo platform is designed to give business travellers a one-stop shop for air, hotel, rail and car bookings, with real-time on-trip expense approval via its native mobile application.
"Traveldoo is part of Expedia Group, so we bring a huge amount of dev experience to delivering consumer-focused travel technology solutions with our online booking tool. The new iteration is designed to follow the Expedia Group booking experience even more closely, combining specialist customisation with business travel buyers in mind. Our mantra is ‘three clicks to book: the user experience has to be seamless, efficient and relevant’,” says Sam Cande, Traveldoo’s UK country manager.
SilverRail and NDC integration
New ahead-of-the-game functionality includes the integration of SilverRail, a market-leading rail aggregator which enables pan-global rail bookings directly from the tool. This summer is expected to see further evolution of the OBT with the integration of NDC using a similar ‘connection via aggregators’ approach.
Mobile: OCR, expense management and approval
The key focus has been in improving the native mobile user experience, to help cement adoption rates and create a clear value proposition for users. Dedicated dev teams closely reference parent company Expedia.com’s best practice principles, and have implemented changes that are directly driven by data and usage. Trending data shows that expense management will become a primarily mobile activity during 2019, as business travellers’ expense claims can be created, submitted and even approved before they get back home. Traveldoo are pushing a “digitalization” strategy, using technology like OCR for real-time receipt analysis, as well as a new archiving capability which will eliminate the need for paper receipts completely.
Virtual & Secure Payments
Traveldoo has forged strong relationships with top players such as Conferma by implementing their technologies into the platform, ensuring they comply with the new PSD2 standards. Traveldoo’s CPO Daniel Fitzgerald explains, "Traveldoo is increasingly moving to a data-driven approach for evolving our functionality and solving user problems. Our latest initiative is to apply machine learning techniques to scan for possible fraudulent behaviour amongst the millions of expense lines that we process. This was simply not possible before. The new technologies will allow Traveldoo to offer a very direct and new type of value-add to its customers."
Vicky is the co-founder of TravelDailyNews Media Network where she is the Editor-in Chief. She is also responsible for the daily operation and the financial policy. She holds a Bachelor's degree in Tourism Business Administration from the Technical University of Athens and a Master in Business Administration (MBA) from the University of Wales.
She has many years of both academic and industrial experience within the travel industry. She has written/edited numerous articles in various tourism magazines.
