EY is ready to expand the Blockchain Booking Experiment

About six months into an experimental project to provide a blockchain-based portal for US employees to book leisure travel, EY’s travel team is poised for global expansion and an additional hotel component. More importantly, however, it makes a “clear case” that such a setup can be used in a larger enterprise ordering environment, global innovation and technology head Ian Spearing said.

Blockchain efforts began to germinate about three years ago, spurred by a desire to access personal content as promised by the New Distribution Capability standard. Like many travel professionals, Spearing, who stressed that all his comments represent his own opinion and not necessarily that of EY or its member firms, said that while he saw “great progress” in the industry in advancing the standard, “we felt that progression over The 10-year period has been quite a long journey.”

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

“We are the best in the market from a technical perspective,” Spearing said. “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.”

As such, the EY teams began exploring startups and disruptors that could potentially be “complementary providers,” he said. They came across blockchain-based travel network Winding Tree, at the time a fledgling company that had just announced an integration with Air Canada’s Direct Connect API. They worked with Winding Tree for a couple of months on a “pure discovery project” to see how content was received through the platform.

Satisfied with these results, the teams decided to expand it to a larger application area, where an airline partner could offer special offers that employees could access for leisure purposes.

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

The EY teams pitched the idea to their global airline partners and found two major US airlines – which the company has yet to publicly name – that were willing to participate. For the front end of the booking portal, they used their own in-house talent to build a tool where employees could search, connect to the Winding Tree platform and, with blockchain authentication, connect directly to operators.

The portal was launched in March last year and has since facilitated about 1,000 leisure bookings for employees, Spearing said. It is hosted on EY’s internal SharePoint site for travel, meetings and events, which Spearing is one of the most visited sites in the company. Employees were also notified of the offer via instant messages with a link.

“The parameters we sent to the vendors were 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,” he 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 the current GDS.”

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

A global view

The offering started only for EY’s US employees, as offering it on a global scale would have added time to development, and the company wanted to “innovate quickly and fail quickly if it didn’t work,” Spearing said. Now that it has proven to be a success, it will expand its offering to employees globally, allowing employees outside the US to book flights to the US on it.

In the coming weeks, the teams will also add a hotel component to the portal, specifically 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 not offered by standard corporate hotel bookings: dry cleaning and gym access, for example. In addition, while such stays are usually booked through the agency or GDS the first time, once at the hotel employees often have to extend their stay, which they do directly with the hotel.

“We then lose visibility,” Spearing said. “This is a way of bringing it back to corporate visibility and giving from a risk and security perspective a view of where people travel, which is very important, but we can also offer personalized and tailored rates for people staying in hotels for long periods of time.”

The EY teams built out a new user interface for hotels and are working with two major hoteliers to offer project pricing, but they are also looking at offering consumer content from the hotels, he said. The hotel project will be available globally at launch.

While it expands the availability of the airline’s leisure offerings, the teams currently have no plans to bring the blockchain project to the corporate side of bookings. The intention was never, Spearing said, to move distribution out of corporate channels.

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

Regardless of the teams’ own enterprise ordering strategy, Spearing said the project has provided a “clear use case” for connecting a vendor from Winding Tree or another blockchain platform that could apply to the enterprise space, particularly by offering content via smart contracts.

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

Travel technology provider Simard, launched in 2021 by Winding Tree founder Pedro Renaud Anderson and travel technology consultant Mathieu Tahon, announced in recent months that it is developing additional pilot projects to provide use cases for its Smart Contracts product. These include collaboration with both Atriis and NuTravel.

If such approaches become more structured and widely adopted in the coming years, the first project will be better prepared to adapt to new deployment developments, Spearing said.

“We’ve positioned ourselves for the future, and that’s what the EY program is all about: testing something that can be used in a few years and putting it in a place that doesn’t create any conflict for anyone in our corporate ordering journey. experience,” he said. “If something were to change in the future, we have a number of years behind us to understand how blockchain works and we can connect to the necessary providers.”

Meanwhile, Spearing said he hoped to see other such experiments in the travel industry.

“People need to stop procrastinating and keep testing things,” Spearing said. “It’s OK if it fails, but by doing nothing we’re not helping anyone and the only one who gets penalized is the end user, the traveller.”