Q&A with Christopherson's CEO, Mike Cameron

Q: There seems to be a lot of movement in the corporate TMC space. Why is this happening now?

‍A: There’s a lot of rapid evolution right now where there’s a handful of really good digital-first startups—the Navans and Spotnanas and TravelPerks of the world. They’ve developed a beautiful, modern interface for their customers, and they’re making a good splash in the market right now.

At the same time, there’s a lot of us that are the established professional service players that have been around for a while. We’re a little more focused on the legacy that we have of providing professional services.

It’s like the new players are trying to figure out how to either buy companies like ours and integrate the professional services into their platform or develop them themselves. And the people like us are trying to figure out how to modernize our digital experience for our customers and be more like them. So, this whole evolutionary process is bringing us all together and converging in a very interesting way.

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Q: Christopherson just announced a new platform called Andavo. Tell us more about that.

‍A: Andavo is a digital platform that manages the travel for our three key user groups: the traveler, the travel manager, and the travel advisor. We’ve built this platform so that it’s able to provide a more modern digital experience that integrates all three together in one place.

Andavo is a cloud-native, API-first platform. It’s going to be built on top of the GDS, so we still have a belief that the GDS can provide us with a lot of good value, and we're strong partners with both Sabre and Travelport. What we just released was the first manifestation of the platform, which is a digital iOS app for travelers that will help the travelers manage their travel experience.

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Q: So, where do you go from here? What’s ahead in the future?

‍A: We’ve got all the foundational work built on the Andavo platform. As I said, the iOS app for the traveler is the first manifestation of the traveler experience. We’re working now on finalizing the new experience for the travel managers.

We’ve always built travel technology for travel managers. That’s where we built our reputation in the business— in building really good technology to help procurement people, finance people, and travel managers do their job. So, we’re reinventing that whole platform. We’ve got most of that designed, and the construction of that platform is underway. We'll be excited to release that next.

Then we’ve got some things we’re doing for the travel advisor. We’re still using the GDS to be the primary source of information for the travel advisors, but we want to be able to provide them with a lot of other information so that they have the insights that they need on their travelers at the time the travelers call, and they can make it a better experience.

So, that’s the interim step in the future. We believe that there’s this convergence of the digital world and the human world. We call it software AND a service. And I think where the real magic is going to come in is when we get our digital platform perfected. At the same time, we’re perfecting all our professional services. And where the magic is going to come in is when we can bring these human and digital platforms together and integrate them in a way that hasn’t been done before.

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‍Q: Do you see that we’ve made progress on the NDC front?

‍A: We believe that NDC is part of this modernization that needs to take place. In this evolution, there’s this whole consumer experience that we’re all used to when we deal with anything else—airlines and car rental companies and hotels. And we just haven’t been able to get that same consumer experience for our travel customers. We believe that NDC is going to be a big part of helping us do that.

We believe that if we can’t get the NDC content directly from the GDS systems in the way that we want, that we’ll be able to get that content in our platform. Because it’s going to be able to access NDC content any way we need it. It’s an important part of this evolutionary process, and it’s necessary for the whole experience to be modernized for travelers, travel managers, and travel advisors—all three.

Watch the interview here:

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