How did Amplitudes come into being and evolve?
José Martinez - I set up Amplitudes in 1991, with virtually no resources, in the suburbs of Toulouse, and I quickly turned to creating tailor-made trips, drawing on my own experience. Given the fairly upmarket clientele interested in this offer, a synergy was born between our tourist and business customers. I had to split the two activities. What differentiated us was that thethe same processes are applied to business travel as to tailor-made travel. We adapt to our customers' needs, not the other way round. In the meantime, we've been through the crises we're all familiar with: health and political crises, September 11, subprimes, chikungunya... But that's a basic fact of our business: we are also crisis managers. And it's precisely because of our flexibility that we're very good in this area. We're capable of rapidly setting up crisis units in the event of a problem, as was the case during the Icelandic volcano episode. We have the DNA of being very customer-focused, with a high degree of customisation. Our challenge is to continue to grow without losing our DNA.
Then came the eYoma turning point... Why did you launch your own SBT?
José Martinez - When the SBTs arrived, we worked with the publishers on the market, and we came up against a number of problems. the constraints of large systems that are too rigid, deadlines, and the impossibility of meeting our customers' needs. I therefore took this major decision by 2019 To launch the development of our own SBT. It was a very important decision for us, because it meant putting several million euros on the table. In the wake of the health crisis, we all found ourselves at a standstill. In the end, this became an opportunity for us. For a small company with 160 employees, it's not easy to free up time and resources. Without this health episode, it would have taken us much longer to design our SBT. We managed to move forward very quickly, with the teams mobilising like never before. The other important element in this new direction is Traveldoowhich was our main tool, and which announced its decommissioning. This confirmed my decision, because being dependent on an external tool that suddenly decides it's finished is not easy. We had over 150,000 bookings a year on Traveldoo. So it also became an opportunity for us. This alignment of the planets gave us a deadline. We decided that the tool had to be in production by June 2023With the end of Traveldoo, customers will be able to switch to this new tool: eYoma. And in this case 100% of our Traveldoo customers have chosen eYoma. We switched over at a breakneck pace. We thought we'd start with small customers, but we also had to switch some major accounts over to our new system. With a very high level of stress, believe me! My conviction is that a travel agency that wants to grow must master its technology to avoid the Traveldoo case. We still have some of our customers who work with KDS, which belongs to one of our main competitors. If Amercian Express GBT decided tomorrow that this was the end for third parties, that would be problematic for some...
So your aim is to be a mono-SBT...
José Martinez - Absolutely. We listen carefully to our customers, some of whom use other tools at a global level, or because they are in the public sector: we're not going to force them to change. But Most of our conquest is done with our own tool, eYoma.
What is eYoma all about?
José Martinez - The eYoma solution is cloud nativeunlike most other tools. This means, for example, that we can install the profile database on our customers' servers. No other tool allows you to do that. So it's just as easy to connect it to any other tool, any API. eYoma uses the latest technologies in terms of development and storage. This means that greater safety, speed, connectivity and flexibility... eYoma's initial roadmap was to bring together all our account managers to list everything our customers were asking us for that we couldn't provide because the existing tools didn't allow it. In this way, we broke down a number of irritants for travel managers and travellers. The devil is in the detail, in the ergonomics, in the ease of configuration... We've worked very hard to ensure that our tool is similar to those used by the general public. Obviously, an SBT incorporates a travel policy, approval systems, workflows... A professional tool is therefore necessarily more complex. But the proof of our success is that, for all our customers, the online adoption rate has risen by at least 4%, and for some even much more. And what's even more astonishing is that this was achieved in just a fortnight.
Who are your customers, and how are their profiles changing, thanks in particular to eYoma?
José Martinez - In 2024, business customers will account for around 165 million euros. There are around 55% of public customers. The type of customer is quite varied, there are customers of all sizes, with a predilection for clients worth between €1 and €3 million. The eYoma tool is still new, but it already has a very good image, as does the mobile application, which is working very well. The big difference with eYoma is that we used to go out to tender and find ourselves up against several players offering the same tool. From then on, the choice was essentially based on price, and that dragged everyone down. So our strategy is to say: our tool is not the same, so potentially the pricing may not be the same. There was also a desire to connect the tool to the main suppliers without intermediaries, such as Air France, so that we could provide all the NDC content without any surcharges. Our tool is NDC native. We were the first to offer OuiGo Plus to our customers, for example. We're connected to Travel Fusion, which gives us access to virtually all the low-cost content in the world, and we're working on a connection to international rail... We're continuing to work on increasing the number of connections that make sense. We're really into the idea of mastering our technology to guarantee our independence. That's the idea behind eYoma, because mastering the product also means being able to adapt it to our customers' needs. This will be much more complicated for a global SBT, which will fear that an adjustment for one customer will have an impact on others. For example, we have a customer with huge security requirements. So he asked us to install the mobile application on his own private store. What third-party tool would accept this? We were able to adapt.
Now that you've embarked on development - and probably recruited accordingly - are you planning any other in-house tools?
José Martinez - There are lots of possibilities. We are already testing a bot connected to a artificial intelligence. We are also working to analyse our customers' travel data to make relevant proposals to 100%, for example by systematically proposing hotel or ticket categories that correspond to their travel habits. We're also giving a great deal of thought to the area of expense accounts. This will clearly be our main focus in 2025.
Is it conceivable that a company could ask another agency to keep eYoma by joining?
José Martinez - It's not the strategy of the moment. It's a real competitive advantage, so I don't want to cannibalise myself.
It's also a question of not being cannibalised and bought out by other agencies, as we've seen on the market recently...
José Martinez - We don't know what the future will bring, but I fiercely defend our independence. That's my vision of a genuine French SME in the travel industry: to have its own tools, adapted to the market and adaptable to international markets.. It's a difficult road to go down, and we had to have the courage to take it. We've noticed that we have a very high satisfaction rate, including with major accounts worth tens of millions of euros that were previously served by a mega TMC. This shows that we have a place, and that large companies and public authorities also want to place their trust in us. A number of buyers have told us that they appreciate working with a company on a human scale, whose managers are approachable, and with whom we can work together.
- For further information, please contact :
José Martinez : jose.martinez@amplitudes.com
