Travel Counsellors: Enriching the Customer Experience

You’ve invested a lot in your own team and your own internal capability, but what is the importance of partnership to you? Why are we working together and what is that actually adding to the value proposition that you provide to your travel councillor community?

We look for a certain type of partner with certain types of qualities – things which are important to me and us as an organisation. Transparency, honesty and openness are the founding principles. There’s a long line of other things but having a partner who gives you the courage to make bold and brave decisions and is a natural extension to our internal team and it should feel seamless.
If you have a proper partner who works with you, not for you, stands shoulder to shoulder through those good and bad times, then you’ve got something which is really special.
Not everyone can achieve that.
Having a partner who’s not only a specialist, who’s not only capable, but also can take your vision, your ideas and move it on two or three spaces and then deliver and execute at pace with precision with quality, is a rare thing and you guys have been able to help support us on that particular journey.

We did a significant piece of work integrating your core data into the Travelogix platform and could you just help us to understand what business outcomes have been achieved by that?

Our corporate business is around about £250 million pounds, so it’s about 25% of our annual turnover. It’s a really important part of our product and our proposition and it’s growing rapidly; we’re growing at around about 15% per year.
We’ve got around about 250 specialist corporate travel professionals, and they work with some of the largest names in global industry.
We work with high-net-worth individuals and organisations so there’s a couple of things when selecting a partner to enrich that. Data security, data privacy is extremely fundamental in terms of what we do. We are very privileged to have these customers, and they entrust us with personal, professional and corporate information.
So – data ownership, understanding it, data sovereignty, knowing where the data is, who has access to it, and then the governance and the wrap around it is really, really important and that was one of our key selection criteria when we embarked on this journey.
Around about three years ago, we built out MyTC which is a client experience environment, and Clekt delivered the data elements for three supporting products.
It brings together the ability for our customers to book their own travel, rail, flight, hotel, car, transfers, chauffeurs, etc. It’s very exacting, and you can do that yourself in a self-managed capability.
The other product that was in that suite was what we called MyTC Insight. If you are an organisation with employees away for corporate travel then you’ve got a duty of care, and you need to know where your clients or your employees are in the world.
The Clekt team and the Clekt solution powers the data environment, which brings to life to our software-based services. It’s really important and has been really successful.
We’ve got around about 35 very large corporate customers using this now and it’s allowing us to attract a new breed of clients who are much larger, much more exacting in their requirements.
In addition to new business, it’s protected and allowed us to retain somewhere in the region for about £7 to 8 million pounds of revenue, where previously we would have lost that to other organisations.
We’ve now got the products and the capabilities that our clients need as they scale and grow their organisations and their businesses and data is at the heart of it, extending our product advantage and our commercial offering.
It’s been a profound success and a real milestone in the evolution of our product suite that we offer to our corporate customers and clients.

That’s fantastic to hear. You mentioned a few different points underpinning that success. You talked about data quality, you talked about data lineage, you talked about trust in the data.
But the foundation stone of the solution that we put together in unison with your team and with Travelogix is the Snowflake data platform.
Now, as you know, Clekt has made a strategic choice to partner with Snowflake exclusively. Why do you think Snowflake is a core tenet of your architecture? What do you think Snowflake brings to Travel Counsellors?

There are lots of data providers out there – there are lots of different technologies so we’re not short of options.
But, I like the values of the business and the organisation, I like their innovation agenda. I like the way they position themselves in the market.
Organisationally and culturally, Snowflake bring a lot to the table and they really stand aside from sort of the others in the mid-pack and when you look at the technology itself, there’s an element of scale.
It’s a multi-cloud solution, which means we’re not tied to a single provider, and we’ve seen that in the recent period with large-scale disaster recovery, being able to fail and operate and have that seamless levels of high availability.
The systems and environment powers a proportion of our business and as we look forward three, five years, it will power an increasing part of our business at an international level, so having high degrees of availability, at least five nines, is super important.
There needs to be a scale aspect which Snowflake provides us, the innovation and the pace of change allows us to innovate on top of that.
You put all of that together as a package and it’s very, very hard not look anywhere else.
And then actually, from a cost perspective, it’s affordable in the right way. I would like it to be cheaper, obviously! But you get what you pay for with these types of things, and it’s super important that you put the investment where it matters.
To have a direct line to exactly where the value is being created and what your technology spend is to enable that value is super important.

Well, let’s, with your permission, let’s turn one eye to the future on a topic that I know is very close to your heart, and that’s AI. Some call it artificial intelligence, but I like to call it assisted intelligence.
And I know you’ve deployed some innovative tools into your Travel Counsellors community recently, not least TC Co-pilot.
I’m really intrigued about your perspective on what you see the future, not only for Travel Counsellors in terms of leveraging AI as a capability, but what do you see more broadly in terms of business leaders adopting AI?

We took a very intentional and deliberate approach to AI. At a personal level, I think there’s a lot of hype in the market. For example, 12-months ago everyone had to have something AI-enabled as a feature, if not you were out of date, out of touch.
If you look at those widgets which were delivered, and some of them were at very big visible names and brands in our sector and others, most of those features have now been deprecated or slowly hidden to the second page.
There’s a saying which says people overestimate what technology can do in the short term and underestimate what it can do in the long term.
And I believe AI is starting to grow into itself. The opportunity is profound. It is a sea change in the capability, the usefulness, the positioning of it. How it moves from the application of technology into a product experience is something we will see over the next two, three, four, five years.
Everyone is coalescing around three big providers of the model, OpenAI, Gemini, you know, Anthropic, Claude, et cetera and they will reach a point of harmony. Some will be strong in other areas, could be image or video generation, both text or conversational search.
Everyone will achieve parity to a certain degree, so it becomes then about how do you differentiate in your sector and in the services you’re trying to deliver.
So our approach, as I said, was very deliberate and it took a long time, it took two years to develop. We didn’t want to just sprinkle on AI or existing tech stack, we wanted to build a product at the heart of it. We wanted to think about the experience, where it’s useful, where it’s novel and we wanted to build something which harnesses the scaling, the efficiency, but enrich it with the information that we have.
We ended up building what we call TC Copilot. We launched it to the market in our travel community 2 weeks ago and it’s landed extremely well, you know, much better than what we’d hoped.
We’ve had people saying things like, I use ChatGPT, I use Gemini, and they’re not as good as Copilot and it’s not that it’s not as good at it. We’ve not built our own, but we know how to use the model to deliver a tailored experience to what they do specifically.
And then you enrich it, more importantly, with the information and the data we hold so we have a completely proprietary built AI platform, which is a digital assistant, to use the word assistant, it is to assist the human, not to replace them.
And that allows our Travel Counsellors to really deliver their services in a more efficient, more timely, more bespoke way to corporate travellers and clients.
I think over the coming years, the outturn, I think AI will still be a buzzword, but it will become more ubiquitous and a better understood technology – a little bit like blockchain and Bitcoin have become part of society.
I think the applications of it will become much more profound and much more impactful as the world gets its head around what it means for the different services and verticals around the globe.

And how have you found the cultural adoption of AI, particularly at leadership level?

People don’t know what they don’t know so there’s an element of education and awareness, and then you’re into tooling and adoption, and then skilling.
There are new roles and new jobs which didn’t exist two years ago. For example, the concept of a prompt engineer, so these were the data scientists which were created five years ago, which didn’t exist two years before.
There’s a whole raft of opportunity.
It’s been hard at times, people don’t like change, people when something is completely new and shiny that they don’t understand, people go back to what they know so, as an organisation, we’ve been quite, I wouldn’t use the word forceful, but we’ve driven it across the organisation.
This is the biggest sea change in technological innovation, probably since the internet was created and there won’t be another one for probably the next 10, 15 years. This will change our lives significantly so it’s about using it or getting left behind.
Skilling, awareness, educational videos, mandatory training, how-to guides are important but the technologies and the products these days are built to be intuitive, so you don’t need a lot to get started.
I think the biggest thing is probably a personality or character trait, and that’s being curious and being a bit brave. For example, ask the tooling how it can help you. These days it will answer you and it will give you a good flavour. Experimentation is really, really key, and we strongly encourage that here. You’re not going to break these systems!
That’s been a challenge here and that’s maybe because of the travel sector and the industry we’re in is not as advanced as other sectors. My technology team, which are more on the cutting edge adopt it, use it, love it, it’s embedded, it’s ingrained.
We’ve seen 15, 20% in productivity from our engineers. We’re using it for advanced security scanning, we’re using it for content creation, so it’s becoming embedded as part of our core product offering and the ways of working.
Just an exciting time to be alive as a technologist and if nobody fails, you learn, don’t you?