BCD Travel (a travel management company) partnered with Travelport Digital to build an app for BCD Travel's clients, called TripSource. This total trip management platform is designed exclusively to service BCD travelers; giving them access to detailed itineraries, departure information, flight notifications, risk alerts and more. Helping travelers stay organized, informed and productive when on the road.
The app is aimed at business travelers with busy schedules who have little time to worry about travel disruptions or delays. The TripSource app takes the hassle out of business travel by keeping travelers up-to-date on all flight disruptions or delays.
The app was first launched in January 2014 - starting off as an itinerary management app but it has grown into a communications, booking and self-service platform that is currently available in 5 languages; English, French, German, Portuguese and Spanish.
The app showcases excellent design and usability thanks to the strong emphasis put on both interactive and visual aspects of the app to ensure a cohesive, simple and engaging experience. The user experience was developed in parallel with agile development allowing regular usability testing and iteration with design. Crafting the interface to the highest quality was prioritised over initially adding lots of extra features, ensuring the main goal of excellent user experience was achieved from the first release.
What are the innovative or unique features?
- Intelligent itinerary management allows business travelers to manage all business trip details including flights, accommodations, ground transfers, car rentals, maps/directions, and details on local events
- Real-time alerts on flight delays and gate changes
- Global risk alerts - send real-time and relevant alerts on natural disasters, terrorist related issues, and more
- Background synchronisation across multiple devices, offline access while roaming or flying
- Ability to add customised, user-generated content
- Travelers can automatically share their initial trip details and any changes with anyone designed as recipients.
- BCD Travel clients can send their travelers, relevantly timed policy driven messages as well as provide policy related information via their My Company section
- Travelers can auto-import confirmation details for reservations made outside BCD Travel
- Travelers can book company preferred hotels from a wide range of content aggregators as well as manage their hotel loyalty programs
- Travelers receive messaging around missing hotel segments, reminding to book company preferred hotels in TripSource
- Ability to book exclusive hotels and for user's to manage their loyalty programs
- Ability to collect qualitative data to explain why users are booking outside of policy.
- Ability to send risk alerts, emergency response notifications
- Ability to capture receipts to make the expense management process easier