Interview with : Laurent La Rocca, CEO of the Treep

Why did you launch the Treep?

Laurent La Rocca - We have created the Treep in 2016, positioning itself as a mobility service for the general public, with a view to reducing CO2 emissions, with an application that aggregated all low-carbon means of transport. Faced with growing demand from businesses and travel agencieswe have evolved and designed a reservation system, an online SBT (Self Booking Tool) for travel agencies for two years now. The agencies wanted to have not only an information tool but also a booking tool, so we developed it with the GDSs and other content aggregators. It took a little time, but we are now fully operational.

What is your positioning?

Laurent La Rocca - Before launching the Treep, I was a marketing director in a large group, responsible for Europe, so I travelled a lot. I realised that the world of business travel had fallen behind other sectors technologicallyThis was particularly true for leisure activities, in relation to the development of tools. My partner and I felt this was a kind of injustice. And when we left our jobs, we also wanted to contribute to a cause: the planet and the environment.impact of transport. We are trying to offer a tool that is not subjective, and to explain to companies that they need to look beyond price and duration to take account of the carbon footprint. When it comes to travel, we encourage our customers to think in three dimensions rather than two. We can't optimise everything for every destination, but there is a very high volume of national and cross-border travel - in fact, it accounts for the overwhelming majority of business travel. When we talk about duration, we're not just looking at flight time, but total duration. Our aim is to present this thinking in 3D and to influence behaviour. It's working quite well, since some of our long-standing customers who have used us directly have reduced their CO2 emissions by 20% in the first year. We've also gamified our interface to celebrate these savings: each time a journey saves carbon, the user contributes these savings to a global company counter, and the community makes progress on this collective mission.

How is this unprecedented period unfolding for your business?

Laurent La Rocca - It's a rather special period, obviously. But it's an interesting time from the point of view of agencies to get equipped, to study points that they don't have time to look at when they're in the thick of things. This is to some extent the only 'positive' point, because we're living in incredible times in terms of the poverty of the number of bookings, and this is putting a strain on the economy of all the players in the sector. We're trying to exploit the 'available brain time' to make them aware of our solution.

How do you view the rise of other new players such as Tripactions, which focus on savings in the travel budget?

Laurent La Rocca - Of course, all the solutions that are being launched play on this lever. But what's more important for a company: reducing the volume of ticket purchases or concentrating instead on the human element, on passenger productivity? Our algorithms interrogate the different options to identify the best solution. Everyone does fare optimisation. If we wanted to stand out from the crowd, that's not what we really needed to work on. Being at the cutting edge of digital technology is crucial, and that's where the problem lies today with SBT solutions for business travel agencies: they've been on the market for a very long time, and they haven't focused enough on ergonomics, to put it mildly. Many studies bear this out. The new players you mentioned, such as TripActions and Travelperk, are real threats to French TMCs. They have been held back a little by Covid, but these players will be arriving, and some of them are already present on the European market. So our positioning is simple: we want to build the best chance for TMCs to resist these new digital players. We are not in the travel agency business. We are there to equip them, to digitalise their relationships with their customers, so that they can be on automatic pilot for 90% of their booking volumes and concentrate on their added value. Robots and automation were invented for repetitive tasks, and we want to position ourselves as the software publisher that will enable French TMCs to withstand the arrival of these behemoths. It's all about nurturing the relationship with our customers, who are not just the buyers but also the users in the company, before, during and after the journey. In 2021, we're going to be developing a number of risk management initiatives, to show how the agency can be proactive when problems arise.

What about expense claims?

Laurent La Rocca - The aim is to keep costs to a minimum. It's crucial for a portal to be rich enough in terms of content so that users aren't tempted to go outside to find what they're looking for. We have selected our suppliers so that all content is prepaid by the company, with no advance payment by the user, even for hotels, low-cost accommodation or car hire. Let's avoid the expense account, which costs the company between €25 and €53 to process. Of course, we can't eliminate 100% from the expense report. That's why we've developed partnerships, and why we continue to explore connections when agencies or companies ask us to. For example, we have finalised a connection with Dimo, and we are connected to Carlabella, Jenji... And we are looking at other connections, because we are very agile when it comes to development. Our strategy is not to develop our own solution in-house, but to interface with existing solutions, of which there are many.

To what extent can you provide a door-to-door service?

Laurent La Rocca - We have developed a door-to-door algorithm, which mainly enables us to give an indicative time, because we have carried out a test on automatic taxi packaging, and the user is not yet ready for this. With our latest version, we're giving a total duration from city centre to city centre. Users can then specify their exact departure and arrival addresses, and here we will no longer be doing the pre-booking work, but will be relying on VTC and taxi aggregators to give them the best prices. Travellers will have a choice, because it doesn't work to impose a partner, and pre-booking is more expensive. Travellers prefer to book from their smartphones to make their own choice, and they do so on D-1 rather than two weeks in advance.

So your solution doesn't cover last-mile reservations?

Laurent La Rocca - No, we list public transport options in 15,000 cities around the world. But you can't reserve a ticket: the electronic payment and ticketing side is not yet sufficiently developed. Too few cities allow you to pre-purchase a ticket via your smartphone. This would obviously be an absolute dream for MaaS! For VTC, we prefer to refer to a platform that will provide the various solutions and allow a rebound on Uber, Free Now or others.

Has the crisis enabled you to identify new avenues of development and new functionalities?

Laurent La Rocca - During containment, we felt very useless. So we set about tackling the notion of risk, which was in danger of stopping travellers coming out of containment, for fear of catching Covid. So we developed a contamination probability algorithm, available as an open source. This is the first demonstration of what we are going to provide in a much more structural and organised way over the coming months. It illustrates how we have challenged ourselves to rethink travel and help employers and employees measure this risk more rationally. Today, everyone is tense, employers prefer to say "travel ban", employees may exercise their right to withdraw for fear of catching the virus. The idea is to really assess the risk, and we're going to develop this for the international market at the level of each country, to support travellers even before they book, offering them a risk analysis with a small gauge that moves from 1 to 5. The company can even use this as an approval system, by defining, for example, that beyond risk level 3 the traveller does not leave. That's the kind of innovation we're working on. We are also in the process of selecting content providers who will enable us to aggregate this data. The idea is to provide very practical information on the concept of risk. The Covid crisis has accelerated our innovation in this area.

Do you think the massive use of videoconferencing will continue after the crisis?

Laurent La Rocca - The crisis has accelerated the digitisation of inter- and intra-company relations at a rapid pace. We have developed teleworking and videoconferencing solutions to replace the need to travel. But I am firmly convinced that all-teleworking doesn't workWe can see that it even creates social problems when everyone stays at home. As far as relations between companies are concerned, I think that a company that no longer travels loses efficiency, commercial impact and control. Companies are going to realise that things can't go on like this, and we're going to go back not to what we had before the crisis, which was perhaps too much in terms of travel, but to a balance between the pre-crisis period and the "all at home" period.

Do you think business travel will return to its former levels?

Laurent La Rocca - Everyone is using videoconferencing at breakneck speed, and it's inevitable that these habits will become entrenched in companies from now on. It's a fact of life. For example, I teach a few courses at ESSEC, which has completely re-equipped its classrooms with dual teaching systems, enabling both face-to-face and distance learning. When the crisis is over, it's hard to imagine them putting all this equipment away in boxes.

Aren't you concerned that some companies are using the environment as a pretext for cutting travel budgets in favour of videoconferencing?

Laurent La Rocca - Not because a videoconference might cost the planet more than a train journey. That's a bit of an exaggeration. It all depends on the type of transport chosen, the length of the journey... What's important about "ecological" is also the "logical" aspect: we can preserve the planet without sacrificing everything else. Companies have the means, and the duty, to set an example by striving to be low-carbon.

How do you view the prospect of a ban on domestic flights?

Laurent La Rocca - I've had customers who regularly travel from Lyon to Brussels by plane. It's an aberration when you see what Thalys allows, with the same door-to-door journey time. But politicians are trying to apply a general line that would apply effectively everywhere. But that's impossible. I'd love to be able to say that we've found a way of travelling 10 km or 10,000 km that's zero-carbon and economical. That would solve everything. It doesn't exist, so we have to make do with what we have. A blanket ban for everyone is a bit like using a bazooka to kill a fly. Our idea is to make digital technology work for each individual situation. On a Paris-Nice trip, if you're looking at price and time, a company will opt for air travel. But why not choose the train on the return journey, with colleagues, with the idea not only of making an ecological gesture but also of being very productive on the train. It's tricks like this that, when we're less constrained by time, encourage us to make choices that ultimately halve our carbon emissions bill. Our work at the Treep also involves calculating the carbon per passenger more precisely. An empty, old aircraft is not the same as a new, full one. We are working on R&D projects to go a little further than the Ademe averages, which are good, which model a general behaviour, but on a particular behaviour there will be variations according to the age of the fleet, in particular. The idea would be to give each airline a score, based on load factors and aircraft performance: we can also make carbon savings by air, even at the margin. Even if, in the end, the best aircraft with the best flight plans will still have a higher carbon footprint than a train.

What is your roadmap for the coming months?

Laurent La Rocca - Our next challenge is toequip as many TMCs as possible in France so that they can resist the wave of Tripactions and Travelperks that is about to break. If agencies don't retool, if they keep the traditional SBTs, it's going to be dramatic. After Covid, there's going to be a trade war. Their best chance of resisting is us. There are a lot of other start-ups in the travel sector, but they have chosen an OTA (Online Travel Agency) model, going into the travel agency business themselves. We're different: we want to partner the agencies by equipping them.