Traveldoo chief product officer Daniel Fitzgerald said the Expedia-owned T&E company decided to start with a hotel app because it's one of the worst areas for leakage for corporate programs. "We wanted to go right after the hardest thing and try to put a mobile app on people's phones that's an equivalent experience of Booking.com," Fitzgerald told BTN, "but with all the controls and duty of care you get with a corporate tool."
The app offers the same capabilities as an online booking tool like hotel results sorted by corporate preference, corporate rates that are highlighted and a straightforward approval process. Fitzgerald said launching a native app rather than a mobile responsive-site was important to Traveldoo because the user experience of an app compares more with the consumer apps travelers are already using outside their corporate programs.
"We're making mobile better; we're pushing hard to set the bar where it's causing a problem, and we're leveraging our ownership structure," Fitzgerald said. "We have access to all the Expedia data analysis, their behavior data, their product?expertise, all of the [comparable intelligence] they do on everything that's working out there. They have a testing approach where they just try thousands and thousands of combinations and different ways to book travel and then just repeatedly and endlessly pick the good ones and go forward."
In a recent interview with The Beat, Expedia CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said even though Traveldoo is a European product, it hopes to expand its global presence.
The Traveldoo hotel app is available on the Apple app store.
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