TruTrip founder Hugh Batley
Building a travel-tech business in the midst of the COVID-19 outbreak. Sounds crazy?
Hugh Batley is just doing that, and this entrepreneur is confident that his startup will weather the ongoing crisis.
Based out of Singapore, TruTrip was started at the end of 2019 by Batley, who is originally from the UK, along with Pinky Tham.
Batley previously worked in the digital marketing industry across Asia, Europe and the Middle East, whereas Pinky was Facebook Southeast Asia’s Partner Manager.
The duo planned to officially launch the product in April this year but the virus onslaught shattered the plans and it forced them to postpone it to August this year.
“For sure, COVID-19 has changed our plans,” he tells e27. “But we were lucky as we were able to move very quickly. We were already moving into a remote style of working to help with collaboration across our teams.”
“On top of that, our team volunteered to temporarily reduce their pay. Plus, the Singapore government did a great job in getting support for the sector. With these changes done so early (80 per cent in February), we were able to significantly lengthen the runway,” he adds.
Business travel post-COVID-19
The virus outbreak has no doubt disrupted the world and put the global travel to a halt. For months, businesses were forced to make drastic changes to the way they operate and dig deep into their cash reserve to cope with the pandemic.
With the number of cases declining, countries are re-opening their travel corridors by stage in most major cities. As travel restrictions across the globe are beginning to ease, green shoots of optimism are sprouting in the industry, with corporate travel being among the first to get back on track.
A survey by the Global Business Travel Association (GBTA) shows that more than half of its members are considering travelling for business in the near future.
TruTrip aims to tap into this opportunity. A business travel management tool, TruTrip provides companies with an online tool to book, manage and approve their business travels — all in one place.
Its features include enabling customers to automate and customise their travel policy to their business needs, besides offering an “extensive inventory” of hotels and flights, from full-service airlines to local low-cost carriers.
Its basic free-to-use offering comes with everything a business needs for basic travel management, including inventory, policy setting and implementation, approval flows, an online booking tool and a few other tools and information.
“Moving away from the entry offering, companies can customise their travel solution with tools and data to have the right solution for them. They include features like risk management, insurances, and finance integrations,” Batley explains.
For several companies on its builder programme, TruTrip is working on the first tranche of customisations (apps), which will be launched in mid-August.
TruTrip has a dedicated team connecting and building out new inventory partnerships and relationships all the time, says Batley. “For flights, we will be offering inventory from TravelFusion, Sabre, direct airlines, and SkyScanner. This part of travel is largely commoditised. Travellers do not appear sensitive to the purchase mechanism/channel as long as they can get competitive pricing and the experience is smooth.”
In his view, too many travel management companies (both digital and traditional) have spent a lot of time focusing on the transactional side of travel, sometimes at the expense of the traveller.
The ongoing crisis has accelerated the glaring need to think more about travellers’ health, care and well-being, as well as how well your travel solutions fit into your business.
“This re-focus onto the management side of travel is where we bring value — for both the traveller and the business,” he says.
The startup’s primary market is Singapore and it has already bagged several clients but Batley doesn’t disclose the number.
At present, TruTrip has around 25 full-time employees. With its core teams based in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta, it also has people working in the US, the UK, India, China, Thailand and Taiwan.
Despite the ongoing crisis affecting his business, Batley is cautiously optimistic about the future.
“Communities are feeling the pain from COVID-19 at so many levels but, at the same time, we also know there is a need to re-establish services and the economy. We are starting to see the green shoots of recovery in the sector. The right type of travel (not just any travel) has shown to bring significant value to businesses, and it undoubtedly will again. We are in a great position to help businesses restart, in a supportive and managed way, their travel,” he remarks.
Right now, the company has its operations only in Singapore but plans to expand to Malaysia by late September. “We will be working to get these two markets right and successful before expanding further,” he shares.
Multiple partnerships
TruTrip has partnered with Riskline, a travel risk intelligence company, to equip business travellers with fully integrated and thorough-country briefings of COVID-19 risk level information, travel disruptions, latest entry and exit requirements as well as real-time travel alerts of every country.
This is a pre-trip step for travellers to have a clearer idea on the extent of the outbreak, safety measures and recovery rate as it might differ from your home country.
It also provides a Trip Companion feature to not only provides you with booking information but also with the latest risk alerts from Riskline and Real-Time Flight Data through its partnership with Cirium.
The Real-Time Flight Data will let travellers know about any flight disruptions as well as gate and terminal information, providing the information they need.
In the event of significant flight disruption, TruTrip’s support team is available to help its customers.
“Last-minute cancellation of flights will be one of the unavoidable scenarios too, as most governments will execute travel restrictions depending on the volatile recovery rate. We have worked with FWD Insurance to bring you flexibility without the airline premium; with our TruFlex offering we make all bookings refundable up to 90 per cent of the original price paid, up to 24hours before the flight,” he boasts.
Besides, the travel-tech startup has also partnered with Dr Anywhere to provide travellers with convenient and accessible health & wellbeing services. A traveller can even speak to them whilst he/she is abroad.
Opportunities
Batley feels that with platforms like Agoda, SkyScanner and Traveloka, the transactional aspect has hit that lowest sustainable bottom — the only savings left to have are eroding profit margins or investments in the user acquisition.
“There has been no run-away success, especially in this region, when looking at corporate travel management. We believe this tells us the problem is not being solved,” he says.
“There are many solutions to existing problems in the market but they are overly complex. If we can simplify that path then we see an ecosystem benefit,” he said.
According to Batley, although his team is cautious about the recovery of the sector, they do not need a full recovery for the business to make sense, unlike larger businesses currently in the space.
“For TruTrip, we look forward and have three core truths. People will still travel for work and travel will return as a norm to many roles in the mid-term (perhaps not the same norm, but a norm). Travel was on track to be an over US$125 billion in Southeast Asia by 2025 — perhaps that now looks like US$70-100 billion, but that is still a very interesting market to be a part of,” he shares.
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Travel Management has been changing for a long time and the experiences in the early days of COVID-19 exposed how underprepared many businesses were. The change that already started is now accelerating and businesses are requiring more than a great online booking tool with competitive pricing.
“Outside of major travel spenders (US$5 million/year), there are very few travel management solutions that offer an integrated and accessible approach to delivering what we see as true travel management,” he said.
The startup has raised some small funding, but fundamentally it is a bootstrapped business. “Funding appears to be more exciting to many entrepreneurs but for us, a business with the right fundamentals is more rewarding. Once we have proven a hit with our user base, there may be a case for investment to expand or indeed if the recovery is slower than expected. But we will look at that towards the end of the year,” Batley concluded.
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Image Credit: TruTrip
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