EY expands blockchain ordering project globally

The accounting and consulting giant EY is to expand its experimental project with a blockchain-based portal where employees can book leisure trips.

EY started the pilot six months ago for US employees to book flights for leisure and now looks to expand it to employees globally, as well as adding a hotel component.

Ian Spearing, EY’s global head of innovation and technology, said the blockchain project showed there was a “clear case” that such a setup could be used in a larger corporate ordering environment.

Spearing added the idea of ​​using blockchain for bookings started three years ago, spurred by a desire to access personal content as promised by the New Distribution Capability (NDC) standard used to sell flights and accessories.

The biggest pain point was the need to align an online booking tool, global distribution system (GDS), travel management company and airlines to access the content, which was not feasible for EY’s team at scale.

Spearing added, “If you have all of those in place, you can receive some NDC content, but our program didn’t allow us to do that because we have more than 100 markets where we have a travel program with multiple technology providers and multiple agencies.”

EY has worked with blockchain specialist Winding Tree and two major US carriers, which have not been named, on the new platform.

“We’re trying to offer more to our employees around talent retention and attraction, so we took it upon ourselves to see how we could use this technology in the leisure space and bring something different to employees,” Spearing said.

The portal was launched in March in the USA and has now facilitated around 1,000 leisure bookings for employees. It is hosted on EY’s internal SharePoint site for travel, meetings and events, with employees receiving notification of the offer via instant messages with a link.

“The parameters we sent to the vendors was that this was something you could use to build a unique proposition for you as a traveler, something you wouldn’t be able to construct on the dot-com side,” Spearing said.

“We wanted to really test how someone can build a combination of discounts and benefits that can be bundled together depending on the route types they want to choose, which is not fully constructed in today’s GDS.”

Spearing said feedback from staff has been “great”, with many staff praising the innovation of the portal.

He added that the initial success of the platform means it will be extended to employees outside the US who can use it to book inbound flights to the US.

In the coming weeks, the teams will also add a hotel component to the portal, particularly focusing on employees who need long hotel stays for project purposes.

EY has many client-facing teams that visit the same city multiple times for stays of several weeks’ duration, and the employees tend to need amenities that are not offered in regular corporate booking portals: such as dry cleaning and gym access.

Additionally, while such stays are usually initially booked through a TMC or GDS, staff often end up extending their stay directly with the hotel, which can lead to a loss of “visibility” about where people are traveling.

“We can also offer personalized and tailored rates for people staying in hotels for longer periods of time,” Spearing added.

The EY teams have built a new user interface for hotels and are working with two major hotel companies to provide project pricing offers. They are also looking at providing consumer leisure content for these hotels. The hotel project will be available globally at launch.

While it expands accessibility to booking flights for leisure, the teams currently have no plans to bring the blockchain project to the corporate side of bookings.

“There is an absolute need for TMCs, booking tools and GDSs for programs of our size,” explained Spearing. “This was just a technology exploration and we always focused on the leisure space first.

“We have identified and proven that there are supply chain efficiencies and visibility improvements by connecting directly to the leisure space. As a business buyer, you can customize content and pricing packages that may not be available in the current ecosystem today.”