Interview: Jean-Christophe Taunay-Bucalo, president & COO, TravelPerk

Jean-Christophe Taunay-Bucalo is president and chief operating officer of TravelPerk

Barcelona-based TravelPerk over the past several years has boosted its footprint through the acquisitions of UK-based Click Travel, US-based AmTrav and, earlier this year, Swiss spend management platform Yokoy. The company recently revealed new branding that brought all those companies under the "TravelPerk company" umbrella, which president and chief operating officer Jean-Christophe Taunay-Bucalo said would bring a "consistency" across the platform.

TravelPerk was among a handful of TMCs named on BTN Europe's 2025 Hotlist and was ranked the 8th largest TMC in Europe in last year's Europe's Leading TMCs report.

Taunay-Bucalo spoke recently to BTN executive editor Michael B. Baker about how the recent acquisitions are fitting into the company's larger strategy, its implementation of AI and its continued effort to build content in its platform. An edited transcript follows.

BTN: What was the impetus behind the new branding?

Jean-Christophe Taunay-Bucalo: We were created 10 years ago, so things have changed quite drastically. If we zoom out and think more about the strategy, there were three main reasons. The first one is that we wanted to bring consistency in the experience of the different brands. If someone is on AmTrav or Click, they're part of the same group, and we wanted to make sure the experience is similar.

The second is that we have acquired an expense management platform. We have some very deep strategic partnerships with other expense platforms. Whether it's through partners or our own solution, we really see the future as being travel and expense, so as a consequence, we needed a brand that was a little more flexible that could reflect the aspect.

The third is that visuals have changed. There is too much blue. When the branding team showed us the competitive landscape, everyone looked the same, including us. We want to be a disruptor. We want to be the next thing in travel and expense, so why should you adhere to this cold way of 10 to 15 years ago? For the visual part, that's why we chose this very bright colour.

BTN: How has the acquisition of AmTrav played out?

Taunay-Bucalo: We started being really focused on the European market, up until about 2019. In 2021 and 2022, we went back into to launching in the US market. When we launched the US market, we realised there were quite of lot of things we didn't know and quite a lot of expertise we needed to acquire. The Click acquisition had been so successful, so what was the equivalent in the US? Who are the people who are incredibly tech-savvy and know how the market works so we can gain the knowledge?

The market share was interesting for us but not the main motivation. The main motivation was tech and knowledge. AmTrav is the best-kept secret of the US business travel market. What they are incredible at is technology. We are very good in technology in general, but we didn’t understand fully the US market, and they brought us this expertise, and now we share a lot of these services together. The platforms are separate, but there are a lot of underlying services that are being shared by both platforms. As a consequence, anybody with our product in the US market is seeing a radical difference compared with last year, day and night, and the AmTrav team is greatly responsible for that.

BTN: And how about the Yokoy acquisition?

Taunay-Bucalo: Whether it's through deep partnership or acquisition, our belief is the market will expect a deeply integrated travel and expense. What we also wanted was to find a company that fit a couple of criteria. For us, it's all about technology, so the first thing we always look at is, how good is the technology? The technology from Yokoy is remarkable.

TravelPerk is very good at distribution, very good at service and very good at developing its own technology, but we want to reinforce the development of our own technology through acquisition. The second [thing] is, do we fit in terms of culture? Mergers or acquisitions make or break because culture works or doesn't. We spent a lot of time when we wanted to evaluate different expense management solutions to see who fits. Now, we have basically integrated the platforms so it's one platform. You can still use only travel or only expense or both together, but it's the same underlying core.

BTN: Will partnerships continue to be a strategy on the expense side?

Taunay-Bucalo: The expense market is linked with regulation, especially in Europe, a bit less the case in the US. In the US, the market is mainly driven by four or five very big fintech players and mainly card-driven. For Europe, it's a very different dynamic: highly regulated markets, a lot of different tax and compliance [regulation] and as a consequence a lot of different accounting software in different places. Hence, nobody can cover everything. You want to continue working with a partner that delivers the best value to your customer.

BTN: TravelPerk announced a $200 million funding round earlier this year. Are you planning more acquisitions?

Taunay-Bucalo: There is nothing planned in terms of acquisitions. We are always listening to what is happening on the market. The core of the investment was to really invest in technology and AI. We think we are already at the tipping point [for] deploying AI in the product, both on the customer-facing [side] but even more in the back office.

We have carved a very nice market for us, and we want to make sure that we can deliver our offering to as many customers as possible in the world. The process and the job to be done means you need a lot of configuration if you want to be mass-market. In order to have this configuration, you need incredibly good engineers. That's where most of the money is going.

BTN: When you mention the focus on AI in the back office, what specifically are you deploying?

Taunay-Bucalo: The way we started with AI, we have focused initially on everything that was post-booking. A customer has booked, and they want to do something. They want to cancel, they want to modify, they want to add a breakfast. The reason we do that is because we have a very large amount of data, and a lot of what was being done underlying required a lot of text. If there's one thing AI is very good at, it's text.

That's what we did with our product where we read automatically all the emails coming from suppliers and we cannot only read them but action them. We know that if a [traveller's] flight is going to be delayed 10 minutes, we send out the information, and she's going to be all right. If it's being delayed by three hours, we could say, "Hey [traveller], your Lufthansa flight is being delayed by three hours. Here are three alternatives to get you there on time." It's faster for the customer.

We are really trying to use AI in the backend to improve the post-booking experience, which to be honest was always kind of the neglected child in most platforms. Now, we are starting to deploy it in the front office. We are using it in reporting, [and] we are using it in chatbot so we can put people in the right places. The one thing we are very aware of is that the level of accuracy we have needs to be perfect. In business travel, accuracy is very important. So, our tolerance for mistakes is very low, and we're very cautious about how we roll out. When it's back office, you have the safety net of the human, but in the front office, it's only the traveller and yourself. We are more cautious on developments to deploy to the end user.

BTN: How is AI being used on the expense side?

Taunay-Bucalo: One of the things that caught my attention when I started to chat with the Yokoy team is their mission is zero-touch expense. The user doesn't want to touch expense, the accountant doesn't want to touch expense, and the financial controller doesn't want expense, but if you don't design the process and if you don't have AI, these three people are going to touch it. You're going to do your expense claim, it's going to be approved by your manager, an accountant is going to check it, and a finance manager is going to enter that manually into the ERP system. All of this is a complete waste of time. There is no reason for that to exist.

Where AI is being deployed, you have an expense, we read the expense accurately, categorise it accurately and post it to the right ERP system. A lot in expense is about reconciliation and categorisation. We had a case very recently with a customer where we went from them doing 80 per cent of the expense manually to them doing 2 per cent. Suddenly, you can use your accountant and your financial controller for things that actually add value. That's the vision we have for AI.

BTN: What's your progress report with New Distribution Capability and content in general?

Taunay-Bucalo: Every month, we add more NDC. We go through the list of every flight we have that has been booked on the platform, from the most frequent, and we keep going, adding Air Canada, Qantas. NDC as a technology is good. Perfect, no, but no technology is perfect. The post-booking is good, the access to fares is really good.

The big thing where we have moved the needle, is we signed a really good partnership with Airbnb, and we also signed extremely good partnerships with different hotel providers all around the world to be sure the customer can access the best loyalty rate possible. That was one of our biggest lessons when we entered the US market is how much the US loves loyalty. Europe likes loyalty. The US loves loyalty, and we didn't fully appreciate it until we had AmTrav. Now, we have extremely good loyalty coverage with all the big players in the US market.

We want to be as direct as possible. We have three core principles. We want to be the same price or cheaper than what you can find online, directly on the website of the company, so that drives a lot of our strategy of connectivity. The second is, you shouldn't lose anything in terms of amenities or advantages. If you have a specific status or loyalty points, you should never lose this. The third is, can we add a little magic to it?

BTN: Will the US and Europe remain your primary focus?

Taunay-Bucalo: Geographically, 95 per cent if not more of our revenue comes from the US and Europe. We have a lot of [business] in destinations in Asia and Africa and South America, but in terms of headquarters of our customers, it's the US and Europe. We have no intention to change that in the short term. We continue to grow fast. We grew 50 per cent year on year, and we will continue to grow 45 to 50 per cent this year. It's about equivalent in every market. Because we entered the US market later, the US has probably a higher potential, but we still grow at a very high pace in Europe as well.

BTN: Have you seen any impact in travel from US foreign policies?

Taunay-Bucalo: We have not seen anything yet. Because our mix in Europe vs. US is what it is, we probably have a little bit of exposure. There's a scenario where there would be a little less, which would be very unfortunate, transatlantic collaboration. We are so strong in Europe that this would be probably replaced by more intra-Europe travel. Because of our mix, we don't think we'll see a lot, but today, it's too hard to judge. 

Editor's note: Following the interview, a TravelPerk spokesperson said the company in the prior four weeks had seen US outbound travel increase 36 per cent year over year and US inbound travel increase 30 per cent year over year.