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TripActions, a venture-funded corporate travel platform, plans to unveil a leisure travel product later this month for its business travel clients, Skift has learned.
A dedicated team is currently working on the leisure product, which will be called Lemonade, according to industry sources.
TripActions confirmed the move after Skift contacted the company.
“We are investing in our personal travel experience to enhance ease of use, improve the user experience, and add functionality to easily add traveling family members to an itinerary — all to make the experience the best possible for our existing business travel users,” said TripActions spokesman Greg Perotta Friday.
Perotta added that the move doesn’t represent a strategy shift as the leisure offering would only be available to TripActions’ business clients. He added that TripActions has no plans to otherwise go direct to consumers.
Tripactions, based in Palo Alto, California, has always enabled employees of its business travel clients to book leisure travel by toggling from a “business trip” to “personal trip,” and to pay for it with a personal credit card after searching for flights, hotels, cars and trains.
The company, which has raised $1.1 billion in total funding, according to Crunchbase, including $125 million in debt in June, clearly intends to invest in the leisure side of the equation.
It’s common for travel agencies to offer both corporate and leisure travel services, although usually this is carried out by different divisions within an agency.
In late March, TripActions generated unfavorable headlines when CEO Ariel Cohen informed some 100 employees over a Zoom call that the company would lay them off. Ultimately, some 300 workers felt that ax at that time.
With travel — and particularly business travel —facing an uneven recovery, many companies are looking to transform their businesses.
Leisure travel could be an incremental revenue stream for Tripactions. There is good reason the company apparently does not intend to go market direct to consumer and compete with major players because that playing field would be daunting to break into.
Said Perotta: “To confirm, there is no change in our strategy; users must be part of an organization that is a customer of TripActions to use our platform, and TripActions has no plans to launch or sell direct to the consumer or leisure travel market.”
Photo Credit: Human resources worker Carmen Oivedo (R) talks to her daughters during their vacations at the beach in Varadero, Cuba, August 26, 2015. Alexandre Meneghini / Reuters
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