HRS until recently sat rather uncomfortably in the minds of
corporate prospects. Was it a sourcing company? Was it a content provider to
the global distribution system? Was it a booking platform? Ragge said the
company is honest with itself that it didn't necessarily make clear from the
beginning the sort of value it can bring to clients. Nevertheless, since it
first made a push into corporate travel, HRS has managed to be disruptive to
the industry under the leadership of Ragge, who also made BTN's Most Influential
in 2014 and 2016.
As the corporate market has broken from all-in-one-providers
of the past—i.e., travel management companies and GDSs—and moved toward
functional and category specialists, HRS has stepped in as an end-to-end
business process-outsourcing partner for corporate hotel programs. As
corporates have gained an appetite for transparency, HRS has leveraged its
unique position in the market as a non-TMC, non-hotelier, non-GDS to make
transparency and data quality a key part of its value proposition. There are
other strengths: its global reach and understanding of a complex, fragmented
industry; its disruptive business model that's predicated on being profitable
only if it delivers value to its clients; its bespoke technology solutions.
This year has furthered HRS' status as a disruptor, as work
with major clients like Siemens have helped the corporate travel industry
ignore its previous exercise of trying to fit HRS into a single box. Instead,
the industry can focus on what the company can do from a customer perspective. "We're
solving a problem; we're saying, 'Give us the challenge from procurement, from
the booking, from the payment experience," Ragge said. "I think this
is where these customers are great lighthouse cases because it shows that
customers just want to get rid of the complexity. Have a partner who does it
and outsource it to get better results."
In addition to Siemens, HRS also has struck
deals with other tech-forward global companies, including Google, Alibaba and,
most recently announced, Amazon. HRS has grown its presence in the U.S.,
opening a San Francisco office in October, joining New York City and Dallas. It's
HRS's 35th office globally. Earlier this year, the company also added a
rate-filtering component to its previously launched Rate Protector Suite. This
shifts the resolution of incorrect hotel rates from a reactive process to a
proactive process prior to booking, and it eliminates difficult-to-detect
squatter rates.