Encore's "accidental" journey to becoming a tech-forward TMC

Since launching Zii, its own travel platform, in 2018, Montreal-based Encore Travel has migrated virtually all of its clients to it, with plans for further innovations on the way.

The development of Zii was "very expensive and very difficult," but Encore went the technology-forward route because it determined doing so was essential to client satisfaction, Encore director of commercial strategy Jake Jonassohn said. Creating the tool was a way to gain control over the whole "big box" of travel, including duty of care, onboarding, training, reporting, booking and analytics, rather than simply serving as a go-between for the client to a third party, he said.

"We were reselling everything we could to allow our clients to do these different things," Jonassohn said. "We decided we had no control over being the world's most loved in any of those categories, outside of the booking experience. We couldn't provide the level of support we know we're capable of."

As such, "we accidentally became a tech company somehow," he said.

At the onset, Encore Travel chief executive and founder Monique Mardinian sat down with clients and came up with a list of 143 issues they had with their current platforms as guidance. What makes Zii different, Jonassohn said, is that it is built on "cost center configurations," meaning each cost center setup on the platform is treated as its own company and could have its own settings applied. Users then can be assigned roles, such as manager access, at each cost center, he said.

As a platform, Jonassohn compared Zii to an "octopus" with everything built as microservices, such as the booking tool or duty-of-care platform. That way, if an arranger whose point of sale is Canada is booking for a U.S.-based employee, they can be launched into the same site with the U.S.-based point of sale extending from that same "octopus," which has two different OBT configurations behind the scenes, he said.

"If you think about multinationals, or super-big conglomerates that own a lot of different companies, they can have the entire experience be uniform for their entire company while having pretty much entirely separate sites, because the cost centers waterfall down," he said.

The structure also can help clients that are growing via acquisition ease new units into a program with a "slow transition," Jonassohn said. For example, a cost center could keep its own policy and have it roll up to the master site.

Some of the features Jonassohn highlighted included built-in tutorials to guide users while onboarding — comparable to the old Microsoft "Clippy" animated paperclip interface — a compliance gamification tool and the capability to designate bookers for guest travel on a per-profile level rather than limiting it to a handful of admins.

Another key feature that Jonassohn said is the "most clicked page in all of Zii" is a "my trips history," which is a record of upcoming and past trips, including itineraries and invoices, in one place. Encore Corporate Travel president Christina Woronchak, who joined the company this year from Deem, said that has proven particularly useful for companies with travelers who move to work in other countries and need trip histories for application purposes.

"You can get that in seconds on this platform," she said. "If you think of large consulting firms that have people relocating to other countries every day, it's an incredible feature."

One of Zii's first features was a scorecard capability, where travelers and team leaders can view their level of compliance compared with others in the company and highlight top performances and those who need improvement. Zii now is beta-testing a sustainability version of the scorecard, where companies can see who is performing the best with sustainability metrics, Jonassohn said.

Zii also is adding a group feature, which it is rolling out in phases, where a planner can build a group, add a list of attendees and send out invitations for Zii users to book within policy. For the first phase, it is available to Encore agents, and it eventually will be available to client planners, with other features — such as invitations for guest travelers — on the way as well, he said.

Ultimately, however, Jonassohn said one of Zii's biggest strengths is its adaptability, with clients even down to the individual traveler level able to submit suggestions for new features, and they are notified when their features are added. Because of Encore's "low tech debt," such additions can be done relatively quickly, Woronchak said.

"If it's a good idea for 80% of our portfolio; it's a no-brainer," Jonassohn said. "We'll just do it."

*This article originally appeared in Business Travel News.