About six months into an experimental project of providing a blockchain-based portal for U.S. employees to book leisure trips, EY’s travel team is ready for global expansion and an added hotel component. More importantly, however, it is coming away with a “clear case” that such a set-up could be used in a larger corporate booking environment, global innovation and technology lead Ian Spearing said.
The blockchain endeavor began to sprout about three years, spurred by a desire to access personalized content as promised by the New Distribution Capability standard. Like many travel professionals, Spearing, who stressed that all his comments represent his own opinion and not necessarily that of EY or its member firms, said that while he was seeing “great strides” in the industry on advancing the standard, “we felt the progression over the 10-year period has been quite the long journey.”
The major pain point was the need to align an online booking tool, a global distribution system, a travel management company and airlines to access the content, which was not feasible for the EY teams on a large scale.
“We are best-in-market from a tech perspective,” Spearing said. “If you have all those in place, you could receive some NDC content, but our program didn’t allow us to do that, because we have more than 100 markets where we have a travel program with multiple technology vendors and multiple agencies.”
As such, the EY teams began exploring startups and disruptors that potentially could be “supplemental suppliers,” he said. They came across blockchain-based travel network Winding Tree, at the time a nascent company that had just announced an integration with Air Canada’s direct-connect API. They worked with Winding Tree for a couple of months on a project of “purely discovery” to see how content was received through the platform.
Satisfied with those results, the teams decided to expand it to a larger use case, in which an airline partner could provide special offers that…
