Serko’s senior vice president for North America talks traveler experience & global expansion
BTE: North American managed travel is just discovering Serko. What’s the history of the company?
D’ASTOLFO: Two guys from New Zealand, Darrin Grafton and Bob Shaw, started a travel tech company in ’94 that was a predecessor to Serko. Then in 2007, they got together again and launched Serko, with Auckland headquarters, other offices in Sydney, China, and a couple of other places. So although it’s a company that’s been around for a while, it’s just
been in local markets, primarily Australia and New Zealand.
BTE: Is Serko a name that’s well-recognized in those markets?
D’ASTOLFO: We have dominant market share in Australia and New Zealand, close to 70 percent. The platform today processes around two and half billion dollars of spend through it with about 6,000 customers using the product, probably doing between 20- to 25-thousand transactions a day. We are both travel and expense, so we compete with all the big guys down under.
BTE: You’re the SVP of North America, which we assume means Serko is expanding here. How did you come to be involved?
D’ASTOLFO: Yes, earlier this year we concurrently launched in North America and in Europe. I know the two co-founders from back when they started. Darrin reached out to me and said, “We’re going to open in North America. We’re doing great down under; we took the company public and the investors want us to expand. We’d love to have you come aboard and help us do that.” So I did my due diligence on Serko the company, on the platform and how they built it.
BTE: How are Serko’s founders approaching the problems in managed travel differently from their competitors?
D’ASTOLFO: The one difference is, they’ve been in the travel technology space since ’94 and they’ve been doing this since 2007. They’re not Silicon Valley-based technologists who are jumping into travel. They understand the travel technology ecosystem very well. I think the biggest difference is the approach to the experience for the traveler. We’re very much into personalizing and leveraging information we know about them to take them on a journey in a very, very tech-enabled way. If you look at all the current online booking tools, they start by having you fill out a form. What our product does is actually start with the concept of conversational commerce. When you look at the screens, it really becomes apparent, because you’ll see questions; you’re not filling in a lot of boxes.
BTE: We’ve heard a lot in the past few months about your product called Zeno. What can you tell us about it?
D’ASTOLFO: Serko Online is our legacy product. Zeno is an entirely re-architected platform with a brand new user experience. More than just a new version, it’s a re-architecting from the bottom up to enable things like NDC and this concept of a marketplace. So in its simplest form, Zeno is our newest booking tool and expense platform, but it’s more than that when you get into the underlying architecture.
BTE: What other technology solutions is Zeno offering?
D’ASTOLFO: On the air search, we’re pulling in RouteHappy content, giving you what the experience will be. We actually make recommendations based on what you’ve done, based on what we know about you, based on who the preferred suppliers are. The real difference is we’re leveraging artificial intelligence, we’re leveraging a lot of information about you, and we’re trying to personalize it. The user interface is very different; when you see it, you’ll see the dramatic difference. And we’ve extended this whole concept of conversational commerce with the Ask Zeno chatbot. Today it’s text but it will shortly be voice.
BTE: You mention the travel marketplace. How is Zeno set up to deliver on that concept?
D’ASTOLFO: We’re going beyond the traditional components of the travel trip – the air, the car, the hotel. For us the marketplace is a concept where we would introduce logically adjacent services, brought by preferred or non-preferred suppliers, that would be center around the traveler and the corporation. So it will be many different services, but all related to, adjacent to and logically extended from the basic travel trip.
BTE: How does that relate to other travel technology developments like NDC?
D’ASTOLFO: Our marketplace is kind of a broad concept and NDC becomes a part of that. We are NDC Level 3 certified, and now we’ve actually deployed ancillary content to our customers through the NDC standard. Our view is that we have a technology platform that is a multi-source engine. Our job at the end of the day is to get the content wherever it may exist, to bring it back into the preferred platform, which is our OBT, on behalf of our corporate clients, our travel agency resellers and their ultimate travelers.
BTE: How does Zeno help the traveler with expense reporting?
D’ASTOLFO: Now our expense report is a little bit different in that it’s actually not a report. We have a fully-integrated expense tool and what happens is, all the relevant travel data is pre-populated on behalf of the traveler. We have real-time expense processing so every element can be submitted through the system, independent of anything else. Let’s say I take a client to dinner. I take out my phone, I open up Zeno, I take a picture, it asks me a couple of questions, and I submit. From an end user perspective, I basically take pictures and when I book something in the travel app, it automatically gets submitted for me. And so I’m done.
BTE: What happens when a company already has an expense tool in place? Can they still use the Zeno booking solution?
D’ASTOLFO: We’re not opposed to, as a matter of fact we encourage, the transfer of our travel data to any expense tool. So while we have an expense tool, we’re not a closed environment; we will partner and share expense data. You should be able to make independent decisions about the two products.
BTE: Besides the technology, what else do you feel makes Serko a viable choice for corporate travel programs around the world?
D’ASTOLFO: The other thing that’s underlying all of this is, I do believe the marketplace wants an alternative, and that’s what I’m here to do. I’m here to help the marketplace appreciate, understand Serko. Because we’re going to be that alternative.