Business travel is recovering as companies return to holding conferences and in-person meetings.
Cheddar News speaks with Michael Sindicich, EVP and General Manager of Liquid at TripActions, about the industry’s outlook. 


Corporate Travel’s Recovery Amid Looming Recession

While recent data showing American companies increasingly reducing pandemic era restrictions on business travel despite persistently high inflation and a looming economic downturn. Well among the companies providing insights into the state of corporate travelers trip actions, a travel management, corporate card and expense management company for businesses, trip accents, just announcing it raised 300 million as the company gears up for expansion and a possible public listing And so joining me now is Michael Cindy sick, executive vice president and GM of liquid at trip actions. Michael thanks so much for coming on the show. I know business travel taking a bit of a nosedive during the height of the pandemic, but are you confident to say that it's back? We are and and thank you so much. First of all, christian for having us back and for following our journey throughout the pandemic, business travel is back. Our customers on a cohort basis are traveling as much as pre pandemic levels granted it's a different type of travel. So we still have the sales and the marketing folks traveling, meeting customers and prospects. But we also see teams bringing their employees back together to build that in person connection and it's something we've always said from day one is important and throughout the pandemic, in fact we see busy travel at a five X increase year over year and expenses at a 7.5 X, year over year in growth and that's a testament to travel coming back as well as more and more companies at an accelerated rate joining our platform and becoming customers I do know for people Michael who travel for business right. It's kind of the floodgates have been opened. Certainly I would say these past six months or so roughly. Do you expect that to continue to expect? It continue to grow even into the winter months? We do, we actually see no slowdown into fall, both on personal travel and as well as business travel, you see naturally seasonality at the end of the november months and during the christmas times and holidays during december and we don't expect any kind of unnatural type of slowdown there. Um and in fact companies need a solution like ours to navigate the uncertain economic times because you still need to get out there? You still need to be selling, You need to be posting really strong revenues and quarters, but you want to do so so really carefully with a close eye on how much you're spending on expenses and travel and make sure that that R. O. I. Is there, which is something that our platform allows you to do. Is there any sort of breakdown in terms of expense spending? Michael, I know you said that was seven times versus about the five times just for travel that we've seen at some of these companies as we do see the resurgence and return at least business travel. What are the expenses that business people are willing to spend on to make those in person connections. Yeah, that's, that's exactly what it is. So um we have a tool called teams travel that allows you to bring your team's back together in an online form and you send it out to your employees and they can all book their trips to come back in person. That product grew 70% month over month from July to August. And then what happens is those teams are spending money on restaurants, on going out on bars on just doing events in person and that's where we see the uptick in that type of spend across the board. And in terms of the money that you raised? 300 million. Congratulations again, how are you gonna use that money to expand? Yeah it's a great question. So our mission is simple but big. It's to make travel easy. We want to bring corporate travel online. We want to automate expense management and we want to give our cfos and customers end to end full time visibility and control of their company spend. We're gonna use the money to continue to double down on our products expand globally and just continue to serve more and more customers who need a product like ours. What about an I. P. O. Michael for the G. M. I. C. Of liquid at trip actions is an I. P. O. On the horizon. Well we're actually not having any information to share about an I. P. O. We're in no rush and we can sustain ourselves with the various customers and monies that we've raised and we don't have anything to share about in IPO at this time. How is inflation impacting the outlook for your sector, your business and of course what we see for business travel. Well inflation causes people to want to control their spend right? And so we saw in the beginning of the pandemic uh for example airlines and hotel prices came down a lot. Then as travel started ramping back up we saw prices start to increase pretty rapidly. And then what happens now is prices are actually coming back down to 2019 levels. And so I think the inflation metrics around travel around expenses are varying and it's a bit of a roller coaster throughout the pandemic. So customers are really needing to keep a close eye on to where spend is going. And again track that R. O. I. To make sure that they're what they're spending on is actually general business and a good outcome. Any sort of outlook, Michael when it comes to corporate events in las Vegas massive hub for all sorts of corporate conferences. I have a friend actually who's there at one right now just before the weekend do we expect these to continue to increase in the months ahead? Of course. You know even throughout the very beginning of the pandemic. People are asking us do we think corporate travel will come back to, we think events will come back and since day one we have always said that nothing can replace the power of in person connections. And I've gone to events, our teams have gone to events. People have gone to events and there really is nothing that can rip. Trying to do events over video conferencing is not very effective and it's not fun. It's not something that we should be doing moving forward and I think a lot of people are realizing it, hence the massive growth and increase in events that are in person now. Alright, Michael, senior executive vice president and GM of liquid at trip actions. Michael, thank you.