Ever counted the steps involved in a business trip, from planning to takeoff to return? Booking flights, hotels and other particulars can weary travelers before they ever leave the house. Sites like Expedia.com offer one-stop search for flights, rooms, car rentals, etc. But they don’t offer a personalized experience or assist travelers through their trip.

Software as a service goes further by analyzing data to plan trips according to individual users’ preferences. It plans them in much less time than it typically takes and sticks around as an assistant for the whole trip, according to Meagen Eisenberg (pictured), chief marketing officer of TripActions Inc.

“If you think about that business-travel trip, there’s 40 steps you have to do along the way,” she said. Many people begin with one of the available travel-planning solutions and then go rogue. It’s not tailored to them, so they go looking elsewhere. TripActions uses machine learning to make accurate predictions that help users breeze through planning and booking.

“We’re constantly learning our users’ preferences,” Eisenberg said. “We start to learn what hotels you’re going to select. Do you like to be near the office? Do you like to be near downtown? Were’ looking at your flights. Do you like aisle? Window?”

TripActions takes care of air, hotel, car, rail, and pretty much anything else travelers need. It cuts the time needed to book a full trip from the typical hour to six minutes, she added.

Eisenberg spoke with John Furrier for a CUBE Conversation at theCUBE’s studio in Palo Alto, California. They discussed how TripActions is disrupting the travel industry with personalized SaaS (see the full interview with transcript here).

This week, theCUBE spotlights TripActions in our Startup of the Week feature.

Data-driven apps to eat legacy sites

Today, the online travel market is worth $800 billion, according to Eisenberg. A report from Allied Market Research predicts that that figure will reach $1,091 billion by 2022. The race to disrupt this massive market is on. Startups are wisely leveraging user data to improve on the experience run-of-the-mill booking sites offer.

“All those online travel agents that played with forecasting, nobody had really taken the customer-centric view and built up the dataset to do it,” Hopper Inc. founder and Chief Executive Officer, Frederic Lalonde, told “Forbes.”

Hopper is an app that watches flights and notifies users about deals that might interest them. It onboards users with a prediction screen. They can choose to buy tickets through Hopper or not. “A lot of people use it just as a planning tool. But if I save you money, eventually we think you’ll become our customer,” Lalonde said.

As users visit to watch flights over and over, Hopper gathers data on them. “We will see you as a user 30 to 40 times before you purchase from us. This gives us an incredible amount of time to understand what you really want and get to know you and do a better job at recommending things. And I think that’s the future of all commerce, not just travel,” Lalonde said.

Founded in 2015, TripActions is already valued at more than $1 billion, giving it the coveted unicorn status. Last November, it secured a Series C funding round of $154 million.

24/7 chat concierge

Part of what’s made TripActions such a success is that it doesn’t stop at flight scheduling. It aims to be a sort of constant companion, covering travelers throughout entire trips. “We’ve got 24/7 support, which not many can compete with,” Eisenberg said. 

Everyone knows that chance can throw a wrench in any business trip long after a plane ticket is purchased. Business travelers often must stick to tight schedules, make pre-set meetings on time, etc. Bad weather, traffic jams, flight changes, and hotel-booking mistakes are some issues that can come up.

TripActions’ app updates to show any changes users should know about. Plus, it offers 24/7 chat. “We can do that because the amount of data we’re looking at,” Eisenberg said.

Having one place to turn for every step of the journey removes friction. “I think about when I used to drive somewhere. I’d pull out a map and map it out, and then I got lucky; and you could do MapQuest, and now you have Waze. We are that Waze experience when you’re travelling,” she said. 

A different kind of rewards program

TripActions is available to individuals, as well as companies from small business to large enterprises. It offers unique ways for businesses to save on traveling expenses. They can strike mutually pleasing deals with employees prone to blissfully maxing out budgets.

This is common in the case of hotel booking. Say an employees is traveling to New York, and the limit for hotel expenses is set to $500 per night. “I would say a normal, typical, behavior is someone would book it at $499 — they go all the way up to the limit,” Eisenberg said. TripActions has arranged a way to pay back rewards to employees if they save their companies money. 

“Let’s say you book it for $400. That $100 savings — $30 goes back to the employee in rewards. They can get an Amazon card, donate to charity, whatever they’d like,” she said. 

TripActions now has 1,500 customers and is adding 200 more per month. It services the likes of Slack Technologies, WeWork Companies and Zoom Video Communications.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations.

Photo: SiliconANGLE