On Stage and Innovating

On Monday of this week, our team attended BTN Group 's 11th Annual Innovate in New York.  If you’ve never attended, I’d characterize it as the Cannes Film Festival and the Academy Awards rolled into one with Louis Magliaro serving as the annual host.   The who’s who of travel shows up in a packed room full of well-dressed business travel colleagues hoping to either win an award or catch a sneak peek of our industry’s latest innovations.  With over a dozen companies competing on stage throughout the day, the technology is cutting edge, and the stakes couldn’t be higher. 

The venue seemed perfect for HRS Group to officially unveil our new workforce solution that has been under wraps and under development led by Tobias Ragge , Luca De Angelis , Vincent Campana and Martin Biermann 's technology teams for more than a year.  With only eight minutes to convince the audience and judges, deciding which customer benefits to highlight was one of day’s biggest challenges. 

The buyers in the audience attend this event annually to:

1. Separate fact from fiction and make sense of the stories they hear
2. Uncover how and what problems are being solved
3. Understand how these new technologies can be implemented

With this launch, HRS Stay, Work & Pay is bringing forth a transformative combination of AI-infused automation and intuitive processes to a segment of managed travel that predominantly depends upon manual processes and long-form spreadsheets.  These workforce challenges begin because traditional online booking tools don't address non-employees and their profiles well or provide any type of automated project planning. These same tools also provide very limited allotment of hotel rooms where corporations are required to provide the name of the traveler staying in the room.

Can you relate?         

It was an ideal stage to introduce our workforce as service solution to an audience that has struggled for decades to capture, track and manage expenditures for crew and workforce travel.   

To put this into perspective, companies in the audience cumulatively spend nearly a billion dollars in travel annually.  Saving just a few percentage points on hotel/air/car spend, reducing operational costs or increasing traveler productivity translates into millions of additional dollars for the travel program.  Finance and procurement organizations are then able to decide whether to reinvest or save that additional money.

In addition to savings, a common theme throughout the series of presentations I heard was how technology is driving transparency and allowing companies to be more agnostic with their approach to service and technology providers.  Using sentiment analysis, AI and machine learning to process large amounts of data was another common thread that aligned with the HRS announcement.  Mat Orrego , a former mentor, friend and founder of Cornerstone Information Systems, showcased UpStream and summarized these themes on stage by saying that, “we need to be more inclusive of more data.” 

HRS Stay, Work & Pay CRO for Workforce, Vincent Campana , made the HRS pitch to this year’s panel of esteemed judges representing buyers, technology providers and consultants that included:

• Matthew Dignan , Travel Meeting & Events, @Takeda pharma
• Susan Lichtenstein , Vice President of Sales, HQ
• Norm Rose , President @Travel Tech Consulting
• Cathy Sharpe , Director of Global Travel and Expense Management Services, ITW

Our presentation highlighted the platform and automation made possible by HRS Group .  Showcasing the technology, savings and tools we built required every minute we were provided on stage.  The message really resonated with those in the audience and formally from the judges that I’ll quote below:

“This [workforce] area of the business is a bit of black hole, and we like what you’ve developed very much.  We like that it sits separately and love the real-time space allotment.  Simplification and changes are very important.   We see this as a very viable opportunity and we’re sure there are buyers that will be interested.” -2024 BTN Innovate Judges

This and other feedback we received at BTN Innovate and throughout this week validates the needs we’ve identified in the market.  In addition to sharing this announcement in New York, HRS sent out a press release as well.  Of course, I also covered it in my last newsletter on the power of teamwork where I expanded upon some the challenges with workforce travel, a growing portion of a company’s travel spend.

If you’d like to learn more about HRS or our workforce technologies, I’d be happy to provide you with a private demonstration or answer any questions you have.  Please reach out!