The global partnership among the three players will aim to eliminate trade-offs that enterprise programmes have faced across user experience, data transparency and payment friction, and global service coverage.
According to the announcement, the partnership will produce an end-to-end travel, payment and expense solution that “will fundamentally reimagine enterprise travel operations,” and will be calibrated to serve “the world's largest and high-performing organisations”.
Although short on detail about how the technology, data and service mechanisms will integrate as a single, marketable product, the announcement does specify which partner will handle each leg of a proverbial three-legged stool.
Kayak for Business will contribute its consumer-oriented booking experience that PwC helped to bring into the corporate market three years ago. Its UX is one advantage, but the partnership will also benefit from its broad access to air and hotel content, including from sources outside traditional global distribution system (GDS) platforms.
Blockskye, which offers a blockchain-based ledger infrastructure for data transparency and a direct-payment philosophy, will concentrate on “frictionless” transactions and expense automation, and provide the reporting spine for “trust and transparency”, according to the companies.
Meanwhile, FCM will contribute its global service and travel management expertise in supporting large-scale, multinational programmes.
The trio promises the eventual setup will reduce friction, improve efficiency and drive measurable cost savings for enterprise organisations. As part of the agreement, FCM parent company Flight Centre Group has invested US$5 million in Blockskye, underscoring its “shared commitment to driving direct payment and expense innovation across the industry”.
Blockskye's direct payment proposition has been one mechanism that delivers cost savings by removing the “cost of payment” from the buyer-supplier relationship.
A rebuttal to Amex GBT-Concur alliance?
Blockskye co-founder and co-CEO Michael Share provided the announcement's most revealing commentary in terms of how the partners see their competitive position in the market.
“The last several years in the industry have seen buyers' options narrow through roll-ups and rebranded legacy systems,” he said, likely referencing not only the recent rebrand of close FCM competitor BCD Travel two months ago, but also the significant consolidation driven by American Express Global Business Travel's acquisition of Egencia in 2021 and CWT last year, then almost immediately unveiling an alliance with legacy booking and expense platform SAP Concur called Complete.
The GBT-Concur pairing shares a technology development roadmap that the duo in October told BTN would allow the partners to "run faster" together with innovation. However, it ostensibly promised another new version of Concur that is slated to get better, more comprehensive upgrades within the GBT partnership than the 2023-era new Concur Travel tools will get with other TMC partners.
The partnership forced a recalibration of all Concur's broader TMC partnerships. Shared Amex GBT-Concur clients have been strongly encouraged to move to the Complete platform, but not everyone is amenable to that configuration, although Concur said there had been “rapid adoption” in a March blog post.
It is also unclear exactly how fast the Complete partnership has been able to run, despite its promises of rapid development and programme impact. The blog discussed most capabilities still in the future tense.
One buyer who has been closely connected to both Amex GBT and Concur last week told BTN that the product so far hasn't produced the right opportunities or value for their programme to sign on. “The big differentiator that I see right now is Amex GBT gets my expense data if I sign up. That does nothing for me — it just gives them a big look inside my closet at what the opportunity is for them,” said the buyer, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “I'm very frustrated.”
Blockskye, FCM and Kayak look to be positioning themselves to capitalise on those types of frustrations. The announcement puts forth an alternative that emphasises a more flexible approach, referring to the partnership as a “framework” for managing enterprise travel “in a transformative way”.
That framework approach is different from BCD Travel's position, which it has called "Open by Design" and which purports to offer an API-driven tech stack that is much more inclusive of third-party technologies.
While FCM has had a reputation for working with third parties, and even eventually investing in them or buying them outright like it did with Shep, the current partnership seems somewhat different. By working within a framework, this partnership — like Amex GBT and Concur's Complete — looks like it will limit the players to innovate more quickly. At the same time, the group's announcement has promised the trio will work closely with customers “to deliver customised solutions to meet evolving enterprise needs”.
Share called it “the first real structural reset the category has had,” while FCM global managing director Melissa Elf called the partnership “groundbreaking”. Kayak for Business SVP Eva Fouquet removed the superlatives but invoked something possibly even more challenging: simplification. She said: “We are coming together to simplify enterprise global travel programmes."
The simplification message from Kayak gives echoes of Navan's objectives, which are to offer a beautiful UX for the traveller and to utilise AI and machine learning to simplify the process and return intuitive, almost “magical” experiences to the user.
While Kayak also brings a consumer experience to the table, it has a major messaging advantage over Navan — Kayak knows travel. It has always been a travel company and Navan has until now led very heavily with technology, acting like a technology company, raising money like one, selling like a tech company and certainly innovating quickly like one.
Navan has deepened its enterprise client bench recently and its service chops with its Reed & Mackey acquisition and some smart hiring decisions, but questions still remain about its service and account management. The Blockskye-FCM-Kayak partnership is nothing if it's not rooted in travel.
It is worth noting that FCM will not gain any current Kayak Enterprise or Blockskye clients with this partnership, according to a source close to the agreement. It is a go-forward agreement only, so the likes of PwC and Deloitte, who were Blockskye's earliest clients, will stay in the portfolio of the originally contracted partner. Likewise, the supporting players for Blockskye like Gant and Altour also will remain in place for that company.
It's clear that another new industry partnership starring Blockskye, FCM and Kayak in the lead roles could make the market competition for managed travel ecosystems that much more exciting and feel like it's full of opportunity.
The current challenge is to determine what's tangible and what's just on paper. For now, the Blockskye-FCM-Kayak news is the announcement itself. Even with just two partners, Complete has been slower to roll out than planned. With a trio can this partnership move faster toward its big promises?
According to the announcement, additional details on the integrated offering and future availability will be shared "in the coming months”.
