Welcome to Travel Again presents the weekly travel Roundup, covering the headwinds and tailwinds impacting the business of travel. Please welcome our hosts, Mike McCormick and Ed Silver. Hello Mike, nice to see you. Hey, how you doing today? Doing good. We took a little July 4th break there for the holiday, getting kids in and out of camp. For me, summer is well underway here in North Carolina. Absolutely, beating the heat. Lots of lake time here, but all is good. Mike, we are on episode nine, if you can believe it. It’s going fast.
All right, let’s get started with episode nine. How about right into the news today, Mike? Sounds good, what you have for us? Well, for this first article, I’m gonna throw you a little bit of a little confusion here just to keep you on your toes. I’ve got three articles mixed up in one just to make it hard for you today. I’m taking three articles from the news: one is about Kayak ramping up in the SME space, the other one is about Ramp doubling down on the SMB space, and Marriott begins pulling bookings away into the SMB space. So I’ll put up some of these articles, but what’s going on here? A lot of action in this space.
Plus you have all the big brand players, whether it’s Amex GBT or soon to be merging with Carlson, you’ve got Navan, and you’ve got a whole bunch of kind of more startup players like my old company AmTrav. We’ve got a lot of folks in this space. Clearly profitable, desirable business. The Marriott one is the one that intrigued me because historically these models where you have a brand doing kind of a branded version of their site, in this case would traditionally might be something where it’s like we’ll give you whole discounts and product and everything, and we’re bundling in and doing a little widget where you have the air booking and all the car and everything else kind of more just from a traditional TMC offering. And you blend that together and you try to go get some business historically.
And the note here about not having to visit third-party services is certainly a stretch, I think. In the past, it was always like they had a little segment of the marketplace, it kind of worked if you were a heavy Marriott user. Maybe you did that for an airline offering like that if you were in one of their hub markets; you might just do it because you’re basically booking them anyway, and if they gave you some sort of financial incentive or some points or status, it might be worth doing. But it wasn’t the driver of the marketplace. You kind of have to dig a little deeper: what are the incentives for the customer to use this as opposed to a provider whose full service has everyone, where you’re negotiating, they bring you deals, and you’re not boxed in necessarily or limited to really booking a single supplier in one of the categories?
The other part of this is that if you’re on the Marriott side of it, you have to continue to invest in keeping the offering up to date—the technology, the capabilities, not just in the hotel part but in everything else you’re doing around it. I look at some of this and go, well, good for Marriott, they partner with a Spotnana who’s making a lot of noise in this sector in terms of providing technology, putting up all different types of offerings in different segments, and now the alignment with Direct Travel etc. All these things that are happening in the space are making headlines for sure and changing the marketplace overall.
My first reaction is to kind of get a little, I’d say, not cynical but kind of like, well, we know what the outcomes are going to be. And then I stopped myself because this isn’t 2019 anymore. It’s a new world; demand has changed, the market’s changed. The ability to do things like this and keep them current is definitely changed. It still takes investment, but the things you can do now and the way you can start to really get more direct, more specific, and create personalized, customized offerings fairly easily has changed a lot over the years. You’re talking about certainly the ability to create direct booking models back to the supplier that are robust. That’s all changed a lot. I’m trying not to bias based on the past here; this is a new marketplace. Everybody’s looking to get a piece of this action, piece of the pie. It’s going to be very interesting to follow to see how this is all going to play out.
You pick some good articles in the sense that this is really a key battleground spot in the marketplace right now in travel. I think it’s one of the hotter spaces and, as our guest will help explain later, they’re hot and heavy in this space also. So I’m excited to bring our guest on a little later. Let’s keep our eye on this small-to-medium sized enterprise level client. All right, Mike, our next article up: I’ve got another one to try to confuse you because this is also somewhat confusing, related to California junk fee law. Now you are supposed to know why online travel companies do so much AB testing. The whole world is trying to figure out how to display junk fees. Airbnb, Expedia, and Booking are all complying with this California junk fee law but in different ways. And to make matters more confusing, this is not the same as the DOT regulations around fee display. Unpack this one for our listeners, please.
Well, you hit on the part I was really honing in on. The California regulations came out first and the enforcement and implementation of them were ahead of what DOT did. Obviously, the California laws are just about California and what you do there. The DOT regulations are federal but they are more specific to airlines because that’s their purview, where the California ones are multiple industries—event ticketing, travel, other sectors that these laws are applying to. My first reaction is always from a customer perspective. I think that having some additional disclosure requirements so that customers understand the true total price of what they’re buying is good. This is very different than in Europe. In Europe, the history is one where you’re looking at total cost when you’re buying. The US is unique in the sense that we’re always very focused on the sticker price, and then there’s the things that happen afterwards.
I think this is an attempt to kind of bring something closer to what really a lot of the rest of the world does, but certainly Europe does, in getting better disclosure. If you’ve got a family of four, all of a sudden you buy your airline tickets let’s say $300 or $400 per head, and then by the time you get to the checkout, you’ve added another $100, $150, $200 a person. That’s real money. You start getting as a percentage of the total, it’s very different. We were both at Cendant during the days when we had your company, Lodging.com, we made the Orbitz acquisition, we had CheapTickets. This was a big part of the business: what are you showing competitively on the first screens versus what the total was at the end, and the customer sensitivity to the taxes and fees category. I think a lot of that has gotten better, but there’s always room for this. From that perspective, I don’t think these are bad things necessarily. We see it in event ticketing—oh my gosh—which is again a big part of travel now. There’s a huge event travel sector that’s really grown, we call it the Taylor Swift effect, but that’s very real money for people when they’re traveling. Event ticketing, when you start getting these huge handling fees at checkout, there was room for cleanup. Generally, I think this is good. Now, I know you have a little different concern maybe given your background.
Protecting the consumer makes perfect sense. My biggest concern here is from a technology and implementation perspective; this is not always easy for these providers to achieve. Even worse, right now across the spectrum, as the article showed, everybody is doing it differently. When you attempt as a consumer to compare total cost, some have taxes in, some don’t, some are displaying the total total, some are not. I’ve heard from some industry colleagues who are struggling to achieve this outside of California for California residents. From a technology perspective, it’s not easy if you don’t have a login to it. What you’ll get is a very disparate set of ability to look across the spectrum and see what the price actually is. From a consumer protection perspective, does that really work? Ultimately, time will tell if everybody’s able to do it the same way, but my concern is that they won’t, and that won’t help consumers. It’s just a different version of murky right here.
We’ll see, but I get it from an implementation perspective. I’ve been in some discussions with clients on the DOT part particularly, and everybody’s really still struggling with how do you actually literally implement this, certainly in the timelines being asked. It’s totally dependent on being an intermediary; as an agency in any form, distributor in any form, you’re totally relying on the feeds you’re getting, and if those aren’t coming to you, then what do you do? How can you even comply? There’s a lot to unpack here and I think more will come. Not to mention the fact that all the airlines—well, except in the US except Southwest—have sued the DOT to try to get these dates to push back or to be reconsidered. Who knows where that’s going to go. Also, we should note that we’re mostly focusing on the California regulations, but there are three other states that have slightly different laws that they’re working on, and those all differ from the DOT and from California, just to make matters more complex. Great, more confusion and traffic.
Okay, on to our last article of the day, Mike. Let’s talk about Delta. Delta Airlines on Thursday forecast record revenue for the third quarter thanks to booming summer travel demand, but its projection fell short of analysts’ estimates as carriers discounted fares after flooding the market with flights. One more comment on this, and then I’ll show the CNBC article. After the revenue miss, CNBC’s Jim Kramer said investors should understand there is a difference between Delta as a stock and Delta as a company. Quote: “The company is terrific. Delta the airline stock is only as good as the weakest competitors because they’re leading a race to the bottom and that’s killing it.” He said if an investor is going to buy a company’s stock, they should first evaluate how its cohorts have been doing over time. Some advice from Jim Kramer. I’ll show you the article, but what’s going on with Delta? What happened here?
First off, where Jim Kramer’s concerned, I’m not a regular—I don’t regularly watch his show—but he tends to be uncharacteristically nice about Delta to make that kind of statement. He’s usually pretty rough on them. Must be a fan. Clearly he is, and for good reason. Delta is certainly the bellwether leader for the industry. They always go first in their earnings calls, the others follow. They clearly have the strongest results and certainly highest market cap of any of the major airlines, so they are in a leadership position for the industry. United and Southwest are another week, 10 days away before they announce. This is the regular rhythm we’re in, and American too.
But his point is really interesting because if you look at Delta as a stock, in August their stock was at 48—I wrote this down—November it was at 30, May was at 53, and now after this it’s back to 43. That’s a pretty volatile swing for the leader of the industry. You’re talking about having record revenues, yes, lower than expected earnings, but you look at the results and there are still really, really strong earnings overall. There are some footnotes here about how they actually take a revenue hit when it relates to the Olympics because of what that does. You would think that’s going to be a big boom for them, but the reality is you’ve got the same capacity, same planes, and now they have to do all kinds of other things in terms of pricing. The net effect is they say they’re going to lose about $100 million. Whether it’s that much, it does show there’s things like that that aren’t necessarily what you would think in terms of positive impacts.
All that being said, we’re still seeing strong results but we are starting to see a little bit of that plateau. They’re starting to point to it. I think Southwest did, United did; they’re all worried that all this growth that we’ve been seeing and overall really strong performance results is starting to plateau. Even though the numbers are growing, there’s also the issues of the effect Boeing has had. On one hand, they’re talking about overcapacity in the industry, and then yet on the other hand, they’re saying they can’t get their planes fast enough. I think there’s a lot in here to unpack, but the realities are that look, overall the industry is strong. There’s still adjustment that needs to happen quarter to quarter and the airline business can’t react that quickly. They have to do their planning so many quarters out in terms of capacity, how they’re selling. They can’t turn on a dime with this. They’re making estimates about what they think it’s going to look like basically next year in terms of their planning and pricing, and you’re not always going to be perfect in that way either. Overall, strong results, but take Jim Kramer’s advice: the stock and the company don’t necessarily aren’t the same thing here. If you’re a day trader and you knew all this a year ago, you’d be cleaning up, but that’s a whole different business. Day traders we are not, Mike. No, we’re not. All right, let’s get on with our guest and our interview. I’m excited for this.
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All right Mike, any last thoughts? No, let’s get going. Let’s bring on to our guest today. We will welcome Rich Liu, CEO of Navan travel. Very excited to have Rich on. Rich is a dynamic leader renowned for architecting high-impact teams and driving growth for the world’s most influential technology companies, with a track record spanning five multi-billion dollar unicorns. Rich has shaped go-to-market strategies for transformative companies like Everlaw, Lattice, Navan, MuleSoft acquired by Salesforce, and Meta formally Facebook. A biomedical engineer turned C-suite executive—you got to ask him about that Mike. His mission is to pioneer legendary organizations that redefine industries and change how people live and work. Please welcome to the stage Rich Liu. Rich, hi, and hi Mike, good to be with you. Welcome. Hi Rich, nice to have you. Greetings from you must be in San Francisco today. Yes, beautiful San Francisco, which means it’s summertime here. I’m not sure if it’s actually 80 degrees outside or 60 degrees outside, and that’s the wonder of a San Francisco summer.
Well, thanks for coming today. We appreciate it. Well, let’s dig in. First off, I got to ask: we have this running joke within the industry where everybody who works in travel, if they leave travel, they go take other jobs, and you count the time anywhere from like 18 to 24 months and they come back again. It’s the industry that’s sucking you back in. Rich, you just can’t do it. It’s like The Godfather III, they keep trying. I was gonna say that makes you Don Corleone, right? Exactly. Well, I have to ask: Ed gave your bio but you left, you had success, but clearly Navan drew you back in. What made you want to come back to travel and back there in particular?
That’s a great question. As a longtime champion, I’m very excited to be here and back leading Navan travel. I think for me, my background is a little different than many industry leaders in the space in that I grew up working in technology companies and building technology companies. It’s actually interesting for me, after having seen the social media thing happen or mobile or cloud—some of these massive mega trends happening in our industry—and now more recently AI. One thing that’s become more and more clear to me is while our world might be becoming ever more digitally connected, ever more globally connected, and sometimes particularly during COVID we might have realized that we can do business pretty effectively online and through all these great technologies we have today. The one thing that became more and more clear to me over the last few years was just because you can doesn’t mean it’s the best way to do it.
One of the things that I believe more strongly now than ever is in the power of actually leveraging in-person human connections to actually get work done. Whether you’re a company that’s looking to grow, looking to get a deal done, looking to scale, or looking to grow, there’s a time and place to use great technology that connects you digitally, but there’s a really strong time and place to make sure that you’re leveraging the power of that human connection. If anything, my time in the tech industry and working at an AI company most recently has made me feel that stronger than ever. So I’m incredibly excited to be back. I have a lot of faith in the vision that Ariel, Ilan, and the Navan leadership team have been building, and I’m excited to build with the team again in the spirit of this really important mission.
What about the bio-med part? Are you putting that to use, Rich? What’s going on? I’m dying to know. You put it in the bio and I want to know what’s happening. I guess it’s a bit of a pattern interrupt. I got a technical degree thinking hey, maybe at some point I’ll be able to use it. I love problem solving, I loved being able to design and build new things, hence the engineering background. I think what I’ve really learned in the 20-some odd years I’ve been on the business side is just the excitement that comes from shaping and building companies and industries and trying to understand what’s happening in this industry, what’s the transformation that’s going on, and how do we build a company, how do we bring a solution to the market that is really going to change the way people live and work given the way these technological advances are unlocking abilities. I think that’s been a common thread in some of the companies I’ve been involved with, is really helping to take these advances and really reshape the way that we do things, which is a lot of what makes me most excited about Navan.
In some of our past podcasts, we’ve been covering some of the sector and clearly with those advancements, it takes a lot of capital to execute on those visions. It’s not for the… you’ve got a whole sector of the traditional travel industry, agencies, distribution, that honestly relatively worked on shoestring budgets. Now, it’s been well reported, TripActions now Navan, you raise really a record amount of capital for the industry, just set about a billion and a half dollars. You’ve got this really robust valuation versus others in the market today. What do you attribute that to? And what can you share? I know there’s always limits on what you can share, but it’s been talked about an IPO for some time and now again looking forward for next year. Anything you can share about the company’s status, plans, where this is all going and how quickly?
Absolutely. A couple points. Number one: as you’ve mentioned, building in this industry and actually doing it right is not as easy as maybe white labeling something and putting a logo on top of it and tada, we have a travel company. I think for your listeners and those who built in this industry, they recognize that there’s a ton from a technological standpoint, from a service standpoint, from a know-how standpoint, from a global standpoint to be able to build it right. First of all, with regard to valuation, those things ebb and flow, we don’t get caught up in the hype. With respect to just Navan in particular and some of the things that I think have made us unique and certainly in the eyes of investors, we’ve been building a different type of company and we really built a diversified business model that is across travel, expense, payments, spanning the capabilities that historically have been built in various different types of companies and industries. But we’ve been doing that from the ground up together, and I think that’s something that’s meaningful and that we’ve invested in.
Now with respect to IPO, obviously when we have news to share on that, we will, but more importantly my goal and our goal as a company isn’t, “Hey, let’s go IPO and then all is done.” We’re in the business of trying to build a durable company that is really transforming the way that companies and people and suppliers think about T&E and that traditional relationship between a supplier, a TMC, a technology provider. That’s really the broader mission that we’re really building towards, really building a scalable, durable business that is effectively operating and built for the long run to lead the industry for decades to come.
I would, when we did talk to the CEO of Direct Travel, when you talk to the folks at Amex, the others—BCD, FCM—everybody’s got in a sense a similar vision. It’s a very competitive marketplace. You’ve got startups in all different forms trying to work on different segments and you’ve got the long tail, the whole traditional industry too. How do you stand out? How do you compete? You said about technology, okay, but it’s not just about that. It can’t be because there’s certainly much more. You mentioned in the beginning about your passion for kind of combining people and technology. A little more about what you think the competitive advantage is, how do you differentiate in a relatively crowded market?
That’s a great question, Mike. You said it earlier: there’s a reason why some of the legacy companies have been building and have been creating that moat for the last several decades. It’s because some of these things aren’t overnight to build, and if someone tells you they built something overnight, many of us who’ve been in the industry will tell you, let’s scratch below the surface and see what that is. When I think about Navan and what we’re trying to build, it’s interesting, one of our investors, Elad Gil, famously called us an “N of 1.” What he means by that and what we mean by that is Navan is the only true end-to-end T&E solution built from the ground up.
We can talk about a couple things from there, why that matters and what it actually means, but when I actually look around at the industry and a lot of providers—whether it’s folks that have been doing it for decades or folks that have been on the scene for only the last few years or few quarters even—they often fall into a couple of categories. There are the modern upstarts, there are the traditional folks, but they often usually fit into a category of either being a point solution, which might fulfill one or a few of the functionalities that we talk about in this stack and then they refer customers to partners to fulfill the rest—for example, an OBT or a TMC or a corporate card or travel payment solution. Then there are folks doing it as a white label where they’re also maybe fulfilling one or a few of the functionalities and it might look like there’s a platform or the same logo or the same umbrella on top of it, but it’s really a white label using partners for the rest of it, whether it’s using a corporate card within my OBT or my OBT is linked to an expense solution.
When you’re using a point-to-point or a white label or anything but truly end-to-end built from the ground up—and we see this in all sorts of other parts of technology in the industry—you end up increasing costs. You usually see some detriment to productivity or reducing control and visibility. Generally, at least the historical situation is that you see frustration from the employees. It doesn’t either feel like it’s built to work together, it doesn’t actually work as well together, or the experience isn’t the right way. When we think about why Navan and what makes us unique, we realize that to actually do this thing right, the idea of travel and expense and the payments and making sure it’s not just an online technology solution but actually has a bona fide tech stack and stack of humans that provide amazing support behind the scenes when you inevitably run into challenges—building that historically has not been easy, which is why different companies have been building different parts of the stack over the years.
Over the last decade, we’ve really set out with that vision in mind of, let’s build all the pieces, be able to make sure they work together seamlessly so that when you have amazing travel solution that is also paired with great support that is linked deeply to the expense and the payment side, that user, that end customer or that end employee is getting that seamless experience. They’re using it, you’re getting that real end-to-end visibility if you’re a CFO or a travel manager, so that you can ensure the traveler safety, so you can actually have the visibility to enforce policy, so you can actually make sure that you’re able to start to really optimize the spend of your program.
All those synergies that come in place from actually having that end-to-end solution, those really start to materialize. That’s one of the things that we’re most excited about: when we start to see all the pieces of the vision come together, we’ve started to see the impact in what our users are experiencing, what our customers are feeling in terms of the bottom-line impact we’re able to drive to their business, not just travel as a tax but travel as a real leverage point to grow the business. Most importantly, as we work with suppliers, really starting to unlock a different dynamic of conversation around a tech-forward, truly tech-enabled company that can build an innovative solution that is also enterprise grade. How do we start to really think about the interesting things that we can start to do with our supply partners to really rethink that dynamic that they just haven’t had accessible before? Those are the types of things that we’ve been thinking a lot about relative to the landscape. At the end of the day, I think we’re still very much in early days and we feel a lot of confidence and conviction in how our approach is coming along and also the results that we’ve been seeing in working with our corporate customers and suppliers and our users who, at the end of the day, we need to keep happy and delighted.
Rich, quick question on your answer. You’re covering a huge swath of types of customer, from all the way down to the small unmanaged all the way up to the most complex of enterprise. When you’re trying to span across that with the technology stack and people, aren’t there gives and takes there? Aren’t some sectors going to lose out in functionality, whether it’s the high-end enterprise or the maybe unmanaged side? Can you really cover the whole spectrum?
In short, yes. Again, it’s easy for me to say that, it’s another thing to explain how. First of all, since the earliest days that Ariel and Ilan started the company, one of the things we cared a lot about was understanding: okay, we know we need to be the company that can be the dominant travel and expense company in all industries in all parts of the world, but we’re not going to start there today. Even in the early days, we were pretty careful about saying: all right, well who are we solving the problem for? While we started working with midsize companies and working with some larger companies and now actually have been going down into working with much smaller companies with our more product-led motion, it was really important for us to always be designing with that end in mind: what is the set of capabilities that even the largest customers need but that also translate out to the broader masses in terms of small and medium-sized companies?
Whether that’s from a product standpoint and making sure that we have enterprise-grade functionality and security and integrations, to making sure that for our smaller companies that we actually have realistically a go-to-market model and a support model and a delivery model that isn’t, “Okay, great, the only way we can work with you is if you pay us a lot of money and we assign you this really awesome heavyweight team to be successful.” We found that the technology stack actually works pretty darn well across segments and regions. Our job is to make sure that for customers who are large multinational organizations all the way through to small companies who might be going onto a managed travel or managed T&E solution for the first time, that we can catch them not so much just with the tech stack, but in a service model and delivery model that’s going to make sense for them. When we think about how we’re able to do that, solving for the bigs but making sure that we can distill it to the right sizes and weights and economics that makes sense for the customer as a business as well as for us to be able to offer it, that’s really been our priority. That’s part of my job as a CEO of travel is to make sure that we’re systematically doing that across segments and regions and industries across the globe. Our commitment is we need to be able to build a healthy organization and business as Navan as a company, but to do that, we also need to make sure that we’re offering a really strong solution across all those segments and regions. That’s sort of been our approach and it’s a combination of thinking about product need, distilling it through tackling markets and tackling areas of the market as we know we can bring them a really strong solution at a weight that is appropriate for them, so that we’re not showing up and saying, “Hey, here’s an SMB, do you need this crazy enterprise grade thing at an enterprise grade price?” Let’s bring you enterprise grade sized down to the model that you can use it in.
One part of that offering you launched was Ava, automated virtual assistant. You said it processes right now about 150,000 monthly chats and more than 35% of which are managed to completion. Clearly a first foray into really leveraging AI. Where does that play into your future plans? Is that a big part of your future plans and where do you see it enabling the customer the most?
It’s a huge part of our future and a huge part of our vision and that’s part of what I’m most excited about, being that our DNA is still very much as a technology company. But first of all, when I think of AI or if somebody were to tell me, “Hey Rich, we have AI in our support or AI in our service,” my first reaction is, “Oh, automated phone bot, oh my gosh, it’s the little tree that I gotta click buttons and get frustrated on.” While that’s historically some of the first layers of just AI within customer service or support, Ava today is already far beyond that. I was reviewing some NPS comments just last week with Ilan, our co-founder, and it was interesting because the test, obviously, the ultimate test is whether the person on the other side needing support realizes they’re working with a technology versus a human. We were asking—one of the questions asked was like—”Hey, how do you compare this with working with a real agent?” and some of the responses were, “Oh my God, I thought that was a real agent helping me,” and they were sort of creeped out in a positive way.
Really, that’s where this thing is going in the actual near term where, imagine the value of having a really strong agent who knows travel, who knows your region, who knows your company, who knows you and the type of travel, knows what trip you’re on right now. We have a really strong team of agents, which I’m very proud of, but now we can augment those agents so that no matter what time of day, no matter where you are on the planet, if there’s no amazing agent to help you right there, but in real time there might be something that’s already pretty darn good for most of what you need to get done, that’s what we’re already seeing today. But more importantly, I think in the long term, Generative AI breathed some really awesome new life into the travel world, but really this idea of hyper-personalization through AI is now just starting to show up.
If I think about this now, right now we’re using AI really effectively on support and taking care of our travelers, but we just planned a trip to China on my personal life and my wife and I spent hours, days, trying to find the perfect hotel. For work travel, that may be what’s in policy, is it close to what I need to get done for my meetings, what’s the hotel booking process, how do I need to think about putting together these pieces by my itinerary? When I think about what AI is going to be capable of in the not-that-distant future, that AI can actually put together that trip itinerary, conceptualize these solutions for travelers that will start the travel planning with something as simple as a voice or chat command rather than doing all these searches and then trying to put these things together. When I look ahead, that’s sort of what we’re going to, and being a technology company at the roots, I’m excited that I believe we can lead our way there in terms of not just providing amazing support to our travelers, but actually going that next level to provide a new degree of functionality and power to them.
This is the part back to the disruptive part of all this. I really look ahead two, three, four years—it always takes longer than you think, right? How long have we been talking about self-driving cars? I think the customer behavior part is not going to move quickly, people changing their habits, changing where they book, who they book with, and doing their planning or how they do their planning. But having said that, it does look like this is going to create a very disruptive effect on the way this industry works because of the connectivity you can create, the personalization you create, the way you can bring the supplier, the way you can create a different type of marketplace here. Again, the resources that you need to do those things, it in and of itself is a differentiator. This is not for small budget work; you need a lot of expertise, a lot of teams, but the outcome could be very powerful, which might have something to do with your valuation and your ability to raise money. Maybe!
Ed and I always have a closing question we ask everybody, and I think this one really… I’m really curious in your answer to this. When you look to the future, we always talk about what is changing and we’ve just spent a nice interview talking about all those things. Name something that you think won’t change for the travel industry.
What I think won’t change? Gosh, I’ll maybe end where I started, which is why I’m back at Navan and why I feel higher conviction in what we’re doing now and our broader industry than ever before. Almost as long as I can remember, people have been talking about how at some point you don’t even need to see humans anymore, you just do it all online and I’ll have my bot talk to your bot or whatever sci-fi thing we want to cook up. But at the end of the day, when I think about who we are as humans, this existential thing that defines us, nothing can replace the power of in-person human connections. They foster relationships, they foster true perspective, they foster real empathy. And on the work setting, we’ve seen it, we’ve already done the experiment during COVID: how much can you do in running a business online or not live? We’ve seen: hey, we could sort of do it, but more now than ever before I’m convinced that over the next few months and few years, people are going to realize that travel and T&E more broadly is no longer just a tax to go run the business. “Ah, we got to do this T&E thing, why? Because it’s sort of what we do.” I think we’re going to really see the next step, which is people understanding and quantifying: wow, this T&E thing, when I do it well, is a massively powerful strategic lever for growing my business. To do that, I need to realize it with a tech stack that makes a ton of sense—end-to-end, ground-up platform that combines the TMC, the OBT, the payment card, and more importantly, the expertise of being able to stay in front of all these technological advances. I think that’s really the future that I see and we see and I’m incredibly excited about, but it always comes back to that point that I think our ancestors knew since the beginning of time, which is in-person human connection really matters and more so now than ever.
We used to say back in our GBTA days, we always said business travel drives business growth. On the business side, it’s the face-to-face. I agree with you completely, I don’t see it as a replacement, but if you can in a really meaningful way enable everyone more and give people the tools so that they don’t waste time doing things that they don’t need to do, that can be done for them. When we talk about our ability to go drive savings, if we can make that 30 minutes per expense report disappear, if we can make all the time spent monkeying around with trying to book the right trip… if we could take all that time out for the finance team downstream, Navan Connect is taking hours and hours out of the end of the month for our finance teams. But really that’s just the beginning.
Rich, thanks for coming on today, appreciate your insight. We’ll be following you closely, of course, and certainly your progress at Navan. Good luck with all of it and we’ll maybe we’ll come back and have you talk again to us a little bit down the road. I love that, thanks so much for having me. Welcome back to the industry, Rich. It’s Rich Liu, Rich is CEO of Navan. Knew you were coming back, matter of time. Just when they thought you were out, they pull you right back in! Thank you, Rich. All right, great to be with you, take care.
All right Mike, very good. We will be right back with headwinds and tailwinds. Well, BLS company, another sponsor, five decades of experience. This company is just a terrific family company founded and led by Phyllis Yoken. They have worldwide coverage, they’re just an industry leader in ground transportation. All the things we talk about all the time about the importance of blending technology, the actual vehicles, the capabilities, the services, but also the personal touch, the family touch, the management of the business. They’re just a terrific leader in the market and certainly in their sector. For your ground transportation needs, contact the Yoken family—Phyllis, Michael, and Eric—at BLS and they will take great care of you.
All right, thanks for that, Mike. And now we will wrap with headwinds and tailwinds where we identify what we think is adding value to travel or taking it away. Mike, you’re up first with tailwinds today. Well, interesting enough, you can see in my backdrop here I’ve got a Boeing 747, but mine was just in the light of all the Boeing news and certainly we’ve been following the impact that’s had on the entire industry in so many ways in a negative sense. The positive thing that came out just recently, I think actually today, was that the FAA’s begun trials for the new Boeing 777X plane. So they’re starting to go through that process. That’s certainly really encouraging because it’s another key kind of updating of a key part of the future aircraft that Boeing will be delivering. To see that that is now progressing, and certainly hopefully with all the lessons learned over the last years here as we move forward, not to say that all is forgotten, but that you move past the certainly the issues. There’s clearly a ton of work still to do to bring Boeing up to a place where they regain the confidence of travelers and the industry alike, but it certainly was great to see that this plane is moving to that phase.
All right, that’s a good one, thanks for that, Mike. I’ve got a headwind for us, and this one is not exactly travel related, but I wanted to bring it to our audience’s attention because there have been multiple cyberattacks in the last, let’s call it 15 to 30 days. One that was so massive it’s being called the largest compilation of passwords ever leaked ever, and it’s something like 10 billion passwords, along with a breach at AT&T including potential text messages and cell records. So all I can say to our listeners, especially for your travel sites: go out and change your passwords to your travel sites and please use a password manager like 1Password or other password managers out there. This is the time. Your password is highly likely to have been leaked as part of this 10 billion passwords that have leaked. Please be cautious out there. That kind of stuff slows us down. If it does go spread further, it definitely can be a headwind. One to watch out for, Mike.
Indeed, impacts every industry, but I know you in particular, this one strikes a nerve. It could be very devastating to certainly anyone in the travel industry. Yes indeed. Okay, thanks, Mike, and that is our show. Thanks again to our sponsors BLS and safetravelRX, and Mike we will be back in two weeks or sooner or soon. Thanks everybody.