In a wide-ranging interview with The Beat, BCD Travel President and Chief Executive Officer John Snyder explained why the travel management company is in the midst of a three-year plan to grow earnings by 35%. The bottom line: Growth is essential to ensuring BCD is positioned to meet clients’ future needs. Here’s a snapshot of some hot topics that emerged during The Beat interview, and what Snyder had to say about them.
Boosting hotel content—and bookings
“We’ve got over 600,000 unique [hotel] properties—so that’s saying that we stripped out all of the duplicate properties and just looked at unique properties in the system. From all that we can see, that is a best-in-class benchmark compared to our competition.”
BCD’s decision to buy the technology behind its TripSource® platform
“Initially, we thought partnering [with GetGoing] was going to be OK, but then as we got deeper into it, we realized this is such a core platform and offering that we needed to own the technology. That’s why we went ahead and did the acquisition, and it’s played out very well for us.”
TripSource developing as a point of sale for travelers
“Being able to utilize [traveler] information to push relevant offerings while they’re on the road—we’re just beginning to tap into that. Long term, that really is our vision, to drive that Amazon effect where we’re able to make relevant and meaningful offerings to the travelers throughout their entire trip, things that will be good for them and good for their corporations during that trip process.”
Why BCD’s robust growth matters
“To be successful, you have to continue to grow and retain the client base that you have. We’ve got to put laser focus on doing all the right things for our customers so we can maintain that high client-retention rate, and we also need to be aggressive out on the sales market and try to win as much new business as we can. I’m convinced if you’re not growing at 3% to 5% a year, you’re eventually going to die if you’re not a solid TMC. We put a lot of focus on that growth factor. That helps drive our bottom line, which then allows us to reinvest back in the business.”
