Grapevine TMC Revenue Calculator: how much revenue are you leaving on the table?

Grapevine TMC Revenue Calculator

Grapevine, the intelligent re-marketing platform that helps Travel Management Companies (TMCs) engage with travelers and drive revenue, has today unveiled its TMC Revenue Calculator designed to highlight the ancillary revenues that TMCs are currently leaving on the table.

Whilst business travellers book almost 100% of flights and rail via their TMC, up to 80% of the remaining trip bookings - such as hotel, car hire, airport parking, ground transport and lounges - are currently transacted off-platform, through non-compliant channels. Not only does this create duty of care compliance, expense management and productivity headaches for corporate employers, but it also results in significant missed revenue opportunities for the TMC.

“TMCs often seem happy with a hotel attachment rate of 20% or less, as this has historically been an acceptable benchmark” says Jack Dow, Founder and CEO of Grapevine. “We know business travelers are staying somewhere, so the TMC should be better placed to fulfill the demand than anyone else. With a simple integration, TMCs can now capture far more bookings which is good news for both the TMC and their clients.”

According to the calculator, a TMC that books 25,000 overnight flights for clients but only captures 20% of hotel bookings (known as the hotel attachment rate), could be missing out on 3m in sales, or ~300k in commissions or more, when combined with other missed ancillary opportunities.

Grapevine’s AI engine Marvin integrates with TMC data sources, identifies booking opportunities and targets travellers with 'right time, right channel' personalised and bookable recommendations throughout the trip, resulting in more in-platform bookings.

“There has long been a huge opportunity for attachment rates to be improved across all travel verticals’, says Julie Lo Bu Said, CEO of the Advantage Travel Partnership, who partnered with Grapevine earlier this year. “We’re excited that solutions like Grapevine are now available to our members to help them claw back revenues as business travel returns”.

It was precisely a focus on increasing revenues per trip that caught the attention of Gray Dawes Travel, Grapevine’s launch client. ‘We actually signed the contract with Grapevine 5 days before we went into lockdown in March 2020”, says Dave Bishop, Gray Dawes’ Chief Commercial Officer. “For us, the pandemic actually reinforced Grapevine’s value proposition, as we knew that if we were only going to be booking a fraction of trips, maximizing revenues per trip and improving duty of care compliance for our clients was more important than ever”.

The tool itself is simple, using a combination of TMC data and industry averages to come up with an initial estimate of revenues being left on the table. There are four inputs: The TMC’s turnover (based on 2019 numbers), the number of annual trips booked, the percentage of trips that are overnight and their hotel attachment rate. The calculator then fills in the rest of the blanks to generate a report that sets out the TMC’s full incremental revenue capture potential.

“I’m delighted to be launching Grapevine’s TMC Revenue Calculator today to highlight lost revenues to business owners”, says Dow. “Every day TMCs are not tackling this issue, they are unnecessarily losing bookings and revenues, and travellers don’t get the end to end experience they deserve. Duty of care compliance and employee well-being are particularly in-focus for corporates post-COVID, so tools like Grapevine that encourage travellers to book in-platform create value for all stakeholders in travel.”

The link to the calculator is available now and free to use for any TMC and can be found at: https://www.grapevine.travel/calculator/index.html

About Grapevine

Grapevine is an AI technology built to significantly improve how TMCs re-engage with business travellers after the initial booking and drive revenue. Their AI engine Marvin integrates with TMC data sources, identifies booking opportunities and targets travellers with 'right time, right channel' personalised and bookable recommendations throughout the trip. Having won multiple awards in the past 3 months, Grapevine is quickly establishing itself as the #1 recognised player in a previously untapped $84bn market.

Winner of the Business Travel Innovation Faceoff at BTN Innovate 2021 (NYC) - Business Travel Show Innovator Award Winner at BTS Europe 2021 - People’s Choice Award, Travel Tech Show 2021 Listed in The Business travel Magazine’s The Tech Hotlist 2021.