Welcome to the Travel Again podcast spotlight series covering the people, products, and technologies that bring the business of travel to life. Please welcome our co-hosts, Mike McCormick and Ed Silver. Hello, Mike. Nice to see you. Good to see you, Ed.
So, Mike, this is another spotlight edition, one in our series of podcast spotlight editions, and today we’re spotlighting a company that’s reinventing business travel from the ground up. I’m excited for this one, Mike.
Well, yeah, and it’s really, I mean, talk about living in interesting times. I mean, from everything around the whole impact that AI is having across just life, business, and certainly our industry. You’ve got in the airline space you’ve got all the dynamic pricing, offers, orders, reinventing of how airline pricing is being done, and then the other industries—sub-industries, meaning hotel, ground, etc.—will follow suit. We’ve got the Navan IPO today, right, which is another just like kind of benchmark. We’ll sure talk a bit about that and the impact about the industry there.
But it’s—we’re really at another huge inflection point in travel. And what’s interesting is what our guest today is going to talk about is how he’s repositioning or positioning his offering, his company, to really take advantage of all that. And it’s again, interesting times. So, you know, you’re either innovating and riding the wave and taking advantage of all this, or you’re going to find yourself watching your business really, really diminish. So, again, we’ve seen these reflection points—inflection points—in the industry over time. You and I have been around for them, and we’re getting pretty good at knowing when we’re at another one, and this is certainly one of them. So, yeah, I’m excited.
One thing too, full disclosure: so our guest today—so I was really, I’m proud to be a part of the team that helped kind of get this company initially kind of off the ground. They’ve taken it now to a whole another level, which I’m really excited to get the update from our guest today. But for me, it’s like kind of a bit of coming home, too. And I’m happy to be doing this one. This one has a more—a very personal kind of meaning to me too. So again, without further ado, maybe we should get into it.
All right, Mike, let’s bust right into it. If you’ve booked travel in the last decade, odds are you felt the impact of today’s guest. He launched eight travel tech companies, taken Mundi public, and now he’s building MyReviva to redefine what’s next. With 10 patents and a track record of disrupting the disruptors, Fareed Joffrey is here to talk about the future of business travel. Mike, he’s at the intersection of AI, dynamic pricing, and business travel and has reached a new inflection point. Joffrey and his team believe they have the answer. Please join me in welcoming Fareed Joffrey, founder and CEO of MyReviva. Joffrey, welcome to the stage.
Thank you very much. Good to be here. Good to have you. Hi, Mike. Good to see you. So, so interesting times, right? But before we jump into the business and all, I think it’s always—your story is great. The number of times you’ve been involved in doing effectively what you’re doing now but in different facets in the industry. So, kind of give our audience a little bit of background but what led you to today? What led you to starting OnReva and then MyReviva and where you are today?
Yeah. So, Mike, my introduction to the industry was way back when I was in graduate school and I studied computer science when computers were just starting to come to the market and realized that this technology, the computer technology, is going to impact many industries. I gravitated to the travel because it’s an industry that doesn’t have any hard assets. It is an information-based industry and it is a perfect match for what computers can do and what the technology can do.
So I started my first company. I was the first one to use Sabre’s technology to build a company and it changed the whole economics of the business because before Sabre, it used to be just done on the telephone and I saw the impact of technology and I have been building companies ever since. Every time there’s a change in technology, there’s an opportunity to build a new company. So I have built eight of them. And the last one we took public, we got rewarded in a big way for creating Mundi and building value for all the stakeholders.
Wow. So when you—I’d say like at this point—tell us a little bit about MyReviva and what problem you’re solving and what you’re doing. Let’s give our audience maybe a little bit of grounding in that first.
Yeah. So as I was sitting on top of Mundi, which was a public company going public, I realized that there is another disruptive technology that’s coming to market. This is some years ago—seven, eight years ago—and that technology was going to be AI. So AI was at that time in its infancy and we saw that technology and it was probably going to be the biggest disruptor ever because we rode the wave of the internet, we rode the wave of the PC, we rode the wave of, you know, Sabre technology, the mainframes, but this one was going to be a big one.
And so I stepped down from Mundi and I started this company and we started filing patents and we said this is how the industry is going to evolve and we were granted 10 patents based on our prediction of where the industry will be and how it’s going to operate. And we are very fortunate that we hit the mark—bullseye—with all our patents because that’s exactly how the industry is evolving and it is showing today, seven eight years later. And the anchor of our whole business model is around AI and direct connects and creating a new model because we were not looking to build another travel agency. We were looking to build a new distribution model, a new platform that kind of becomes different than the legacy platforms that operate in the industry today. And the idea was to create a win-win-win situation for everybody with this platform.
And you’re focused on the business travel marketplace and, like you said, you’re not trying to create or recreate a travel agency, but it’s really about bringing the whole marketplace to bear in a way that few have done right or kind of maybe some aspire to do. Tell us a little bit more about that, like when you talk about the customer proposition and why customers value you. What do they really see when you sign on more business? What does a corporation see in your proposition that they benefit from?
Well, if you look at—I mean, you have to ask the question because there are many stakeholders in the corporate travel business. One stakeholder is a traveler who travels and says, “I want to have service this way.” So that has to be the center of your universe if you’re building anything—that’s the end customer who’s going to use the service and either is going to like it or not like it. Then there is a company that actually pays for the travel and they’re underwriting the trip and they want to make sure their money is being spent wisely while the traveler is happy. Then there are the suppliers who want to make sure that they take very good care of their customers and they want to make sure they understand who the customer is, what their needs are, and so when they are in a plane or at a hotel, that they provide the best service so that they want to know their customer better.
So those are the things that are missing in the industry today and we can get deeper into it, but overall the model has to be different. For example, in the retail industry, you have a model which is a Walmart model, right? It’s a huge, world’s largest retailer. But then there was an opportunity to build a different model, which is what Amazon created. So Amazon is in the retail business, but their model is different than the Walmart model. So when you buy something, you’re buying from Walmart if you’re buying at Walmart. When you’re buying at Amazon, you’re buying from six million different suppliers. And so you have more choices. You get lower prices. You have a choice of who you want to buy from. That’s a different model. Now, both of them are successful. Both of them are working. Walmart is growing. They are doing great. But Amazon is where the value—big value, long-term value—is getting created for the retail market.
In the travel industry, the whole industry has been built around a travel agency model up until now in the business market. And when we look at the industry, the first thing we look for is: where are the inefficiencies in the industry? Which things can be improved upon with a new technology and how can we provide better services to the three main stakeholders that I mentioned—the traveler, the company, and the supplier? And we believe that that is the model that we have created and that’s the model that we got multiple patents on.
So if you look at all the data about the traveler—and there was a data set that came out yesterday or day before from Phocuswright—that 62% of all travelers are buying directly from the supplier. And that includes hotels although it is weighted towards the airline. Because if I—if you look at—I mean, we run a marketplace, we call it a marketplace because it’s much like the Amazon model of you have choices to buy from whoever you want to buy from on our platform. So keep in mind, we are not a travel agency. We don’t compete with any travel agency. We are a platform, and in fact, we have multiple travel agencies who are on our platform.
Agencies are our partners as are suppliers. We have airlines who are our partners. We have hotels who are our partners, car rental companies who are our partners. We allow them to put their product on our platform and we let the customer buy from whoever they want to buy from. So the customers have choice to buy from anybody they want to, including travel agencies, OTAs, or the suppliers directly like airlines or hotels. So when we put our platform out, that customer who used to go to the airline and spend a lot of time going from one airline to another to match, compare prices—they don’t have to do that because all the airlines are there in one place and they with a single query they can see everybody’s results.
Joffrey, how is your distribution and connectivity different though? What makes it unique as a part of your marketplace?
So our connectivity is that when you are at our marketplace you can search, compare, and buy, and the whole fulfillment happens in the platform. So we don’t send you off to the supplier’s website. We bring the supplier’s website into our platform. So you stay within the platform. The best thing is that—I remember about 30 years ago there was a report by Forrester that said that someday a traveler will be able to buy a ticket directly from an airline, get a hotel directly from a hotel company, buy a car directly from a car rental company and be able to put it all together in a single itinerary. And that is exactly what we are doing. You can buy the airline ticket, for example, from United. You can get your hotel from Marriott. You can get your car rental from Hertz. And it’ll all come together in a single itinerary with a single point of service or you can get it serviced directly from the suppliers.
But that to me sounds very TMC-like, but I’ve heard you talk about how MyReviva is really different than a TMC. Can you elaborate?
Yeah, because we don’t issue any tickets. TMC has to be the agent of record. We are not an agent of record. We are not the merchant of any product. We are just a platform. And that’s why travel agents can come into our platform, offer it to their customers, but the customer has a choice. Do they want to buy from the travel agent or they want to buy directly from the airlines? So there is no platform today that allows you to do that.
Right. And I know you’re—a big part of your sales growth has really come from the small to medium-sized business category. I would think that’s really attractive to them. In that world where they’ve really been kind of effectively underserviced by the past iterations—really hard for them to get the level of attention, it tends to be expensive, they’re not necessarily getting the best rates and deals as opposed to larger companies that could really invest with the TMC—tell us a little bit. That’s been a big growth area for you right, in terms of where you’ve aggregated business so far?
Actually, that is a growth area for everybody. We talked to a lot of suppliers also and they said, “We have been trying to penetrate that market. Nobody has been successful in penetrating that market because it is six million companies and trying to aggregate that is like herding cats.” So there is no easy way to do it.
That market lies between a consumer market and a large enterprise corporate market. It’s a hybrid market. They want to go buy from the suppliers directly because they feel they can get better deals. They go to the web, they go to OTAs, they go to suppliers. They spend a lot of time trying to find the best deal and that market—you can’t herd them and say you’re forced to buy from a single travel agency because they are not going to and you can’t mandate it because they are not of the size.
So our solution has resonated with that market and we are growing at over 100% per year and have been for the last several years. It is because the market is hearing about us and the customers love the platform because it gives them the freedom to go buy directly from American, United, Southwest, the hotels, car rental companies. But the beauty of it is the suppliers love it because they get the customer and they get the customer data which they didn’t get before. The company loves it because today the big problem is of leakage. When the traveler goes out on the web and buys there, the company loses track of them for duty of care, for reporting, for analytics. But when they do it through the MyReviva platform, the company gets full visibility into every transaction and provide duty of care and the customer is happy because they can go buy directly from the suppliers.
To your point, just knowing being able to track all the activity and look for ways ultimately to educate their travelers. Because we know too, a lot of those companies—they may have policies, but they don’t have the whole infrastructure, nor do they want to have the infrastructure that a big company would traditionally have around travel policy and enforcement. They want to make it simple, easy as possible, but still accomplish those objectives, make sure that they close the loop on all of their travel expend. And that’s been a big missing part for those companies over the years.
Yeah, it is, because our platform is built around the AI technology. So we do have policies. So companies can put in their policies down to the individual level or the group level or the supplier level—which suppliers they want to make sure show up and which suppliers are not allowed for the company travelers. So all of that is what AI is making possible because prior to that, as you are from the industry, it had to be separate systems, you had to run it through different channels and try to manage all that. AI can solve a lot of those problems and that is what makes it so efficient.
It reminds me that there were cars being made before Ford started and what he found was there was inefficiency in building cars and he created a more efficient metal model of how to build cars and at a lower cost and better quality. So it was faster, cheaper, better and that’s what made his car company more successful than the old fashioned way of assembling cars. So similarly in travel, AI will take out a lot of efficiencies. Some of it were taken out by the internet—as you remember, the customers had to wait with the travel agent to go get the flights and all that and now they can do it themselves. But now AI is going to become your travel agent. And that’s essentially why we changed our name from OnReva to MyReviva, because you will have your own personal travel agent who can go and do all the things for you and do it faster, cheaper, better than anything or anybody else can do.
Joffrey, sounds like you’ve been successfully using AI for some time now. Any tips or tricks for our audience about how to activate AI within their businesses? How have you been so successful using it? Not everybody has.
Well, we actually partnered with Salesforce. They are a big player in AI agents. We are working with them. They are our partner as are some other AI companies and that’s what we are using for your personal travel agent. But we’ve also been using AI in our platform to embed policy, duty of care, reporting, analytics—what you want to accomplish as a company, as a traveler. We train our AI with the traveler’s profile to begin with. And then we refine that model. As the traveler uses the system, the AI learns more and becomes more and more personal to you. So over time, you would almost always have the AI. That’s our goal is to have the AI do all your heavy lifting and searching and comparing and optimizing for you. And that takes time. But we have started on that journey and we are finding great success with that.
I think what’s interesting—and this is back to one of my contentions though about as all this gets reinvented—it still comes back to trust in the brand and the product and the platform. Because if I’m a company, I need to trust MyReviva is not effectively building in bias or basically something that benefits maybe them but not me as the buyer.
When I hear about, for example, airlines saying, “Wow, guess what? Now I’m going to have all this highly dynamic offers and orders and pricing,” well, sure, for them to disintermediate the market in a way that allows them to capture more yield—I get why they want that, but how is that going to benefit the customer? Where’s the traveler and or in this case, the company who’s paying for all this? Who’s looking out for them in this equation?
And I mean, I think back to MyReviva—the role you could play very much so is being that trusted platform in a way that—I’m not trusting the suppliers are looking after my best interest when it comes to what I’m paying. How could you? Or some random AI bot that like is built like, “Oh, use this one, it’ll find me the best deals.” Like, well, maybe, but am I really seeing the whole marketplace? Am I really getting all the content? And I think that’s again what you’re ahead of the game in terms of the positioning because that’s where I think ultimately that’s going to really play out to be important to customers down the road. Where do you see—okay so now you’re trying to be ahead of the game. It’s a competitive marketplace. A lot of money is being spent. Where do you see it all going for MyReviva? When you look ahead, even a year from now, a couple years from now, where are you focused?
So Mike, one I want to make sure that I kind of build on your word that if you’re not a trusted advisor, if you’re not a trusted partner—if there is no trust, you cannot build a business. So I mean you can make all kinds of claims but at the end of the day the customer has to trust you and feel like—because they have choice. They can go to the market and they can compare and they can look and they say, “Okay, you made this claim and you are really not a marketplace because I can go find better prices elsewhere.”
Once in a while you may, but just like you do at Costco. When I first went to Costco, I compared prices with Target and then I realized, they deliver on that promise and that’s why they have 100 million customers who are willing to pay for that, right? Similarly, when I go to Amazon, I don’t go and compare anymore the convenience, the time, the variety, the breadth of offerings. So that is the starting point of building a company is one you have to focus on your customer, two you have to build the trust and then deliver on that promise. So that’s what we are doing.
The thing that we are bringing into play is that the technology is going to be your partner along the way but we control the technology and the access to the content. Now as you know you just mentioned something which is dynamic pricing. The market is already very complex. I come from a time when there were only 5,000 fares available in the entire market when it was regulated. Now, there’s over a billion fares in the market. When it goes to dynamic pricing, there will be an infinite number of fares that will get created because they are dynamically being created every second and packaging and so it is going to get more complex. It is almost impossible for a travel agent to parse through that and to come up with an optimal solution for you. And that is why without AI there is no way to navigate the new landscape.
And so that’s what we are betting on. That’s what we have filed the patents on and have been granted those because this landscape is getting more complex not less. And without AI who knows you and navigate it for you, there’s no other way to get through this phase.
Ed, any final thoughts or questions for Joffrey?
Well, I mean Joffrey, just step back from MyReviva for a moment. Think about the next kind of 12 to 24 months, put AI aside. What other innovations do you see out there for the travel landscape that are kind of coming down the road?
So Ed, as you know, NDC was a big game changer because prior to that, you had to have a GDS to be able to get access to all the content. The content was limited because they were built on old technology like Edifact and all those ancient networks. But now there is much richer content and that’s what customers want. So that innovation is going to transform the industry in a significant way. The NDC content and the ability for the customer to get access to all that content and make decisions based on all content, not limited content.
The second is that there is going—it’s a two-way channel. It’s you can interact directly with a customer—the supplier can because this is a broadband channel and you can create offerings for that particular customer. Each supplier can knowing who the customer is and that is an offering that would be custom-made for the customer. So we see that coming and I think it’s inevitable that will happen and that is only possible because of two things. One is a direct connect NDC kind of thing for the airlines, direct connect for the hotels and car rental companies and the ability for the airlines to know the customer and then create packages for that customer which they are working on right now but it’s not there. And secondly, for the customer to be able to manage those packages and pricing and to be able to say this is the optimal thing for me which I think is what the AI agent will do for the customer. So I think there’ll be AI technology on the airline side, AI technology on the customer side. And that will optimize and make the market more efficient and make the products more customized and it will be the best for all stakeholders—the suppliers, the travelers, and the corporate buyers.
Well, again, thanks for joining us, Joffrey. Appreciate it. And it’s great to see the company growing at the pace it is, but it doesn’t surprise me. Sometimes they say about overnight success, as you know, there is no such thing. It takes 20 years to get overnight success. But again, credit to your resilience, determination and you keep coming back for more. But it’s a great industry as you know and I think again these are exciting times certainly for your company and for those that are out there on the cutting edge of innovation. So again, congratulations with your success to date and best wishes for more to come.
Thank you for joining us. Fareed Joffrey is founder and CEO of MyReviva. To learn more about MyReviva, go to https://www.google.com/search?q=myreviva.com. Joffrey, thanks for joining us on Spotlight Edition.
Mike, that is it for today. This has been another excellent edition of the Travel Again podcast spotlight edition. Until next time, I’ll see you out there. See you.