With thesimultaneous acquisition ofiAlbatros and Xpenditure in March 2017, the Sodexo on the business travel market was only a matter of time. Since 5 June, it's official: a new player has made a remarkable entry into the business travel ecosystem, which is so used to 'disruptive' announcements. Rydoo - is its name - is intended to embody a new concept of governance, called "corp-up. Clearly, rather than simply merging iAlbatros and Xpenditure into Sodexo, the aim is to leverage both the strength of a large group and the responsiveness of the two start-ups, maintained at their respective sites in Poland and Belgium.
Beyond the 'internal kitchen', it is above all Rydoo's user experience and functionalities that will interest the market: the new solution unveiled on Tuesday is built around two building blocks, Rydoo Travel and Rydoo Expense. The former covers air, rail and hotel reservations, with some 800,000 establishments listed. The tool also integrates the centralised payment and can be configured according to the company's travel policy. As for the second offer, Rydoo ExpenseAs its name suggests, it tackles the problem of managing expense claims by allowing you to take a simple photo of the receipt using your smartphone, without even having to keep the paper document.
With Rydoo, Sodexo intends to stand out in more ways than one. Its solution is marketed in the form of a subscription with prices starting at 6 euros per month per active user, instead of the usual transaction fee. What's more, the new tool focuses on simplicity and even standardisation. " We leave customisation to the other players in the market "Rydoo's managers explain. The client company can therefore configure Rydoo Travel using around thirty fields, but its room for manoeuvre is not unlimited. The same applies to the reportingwhich will follow a single format. This standardisation will ensure short deployment timewhich, according to Rydoo management, is far inferior to more customised solutions.
With this new tool, Sodexo aims to stand out from the competition, which is essentially targeting key accounts. For Sébastien Marchon, CEO of Rydoo, " 83% of companies do not use a travel and expense management solution because there is no offer covering all stages of the journey, and small and medium-sized enterprises see no point in signing four or five different contracts for a limited travel budget" . Rydoo is therefore targeting "mid-marketthis pool of companies whose business travel is quantified from €200,000 to €1 million each year, most of which are managed using Excel spreadsheets. " Our main competitor is the sheet of paper" says Sébastien Marchon.
cutting ties with all these players to move ahead faster than they do
To build their tool, however, Rydoo's managers took a close look at other existing travel & expense solutions. They came to the following conclusion: business travel players are penalised by excessively long innovation processes, and the interconnection between publishers, travel agencies and others GDS would be a brake on innovation. " So we decided to cut our ties with all these players to move forward more quickly than they did." says Sébastien Marchon, CEO of Rydoo. Moreover, Sodexo officials have confirmed that they would not connect the Rydoo tool with a TMC, while refusing to identify the agencies as genuine competitors. Rydoo's managers intend to stand above the fray: " Our competitors are not TMCs, publishers such as Concur or KDS, or payment solutions, as we cover all aspects ourselves." says Sébastien Marchon, pointing out that Rydoo also includes a call centre for handling complex and unforeseen issues offline. A call centre staffed by... travel agents.
Barely launched on the business travel market, Rydoo is already looking ahead to the next stages of its development. For example, the booking of taxis and VTCs should be integrated by the end of the year. Just like collaborative hosting platforms such as Airbnb or even the setting up of a chatbot to make the user experience more fluid.
