taptrip

The proposition

Sometimes an idea comes along that’s so simple and refreshing it’s hard to comprehend how we lived without it. It’s what some say Netflix did for TV and Uber did for taxis and now, causing disruption to online booking for business travel, taptrip is the one to watch.

Born from the founders’ personal frustration of laborious hours spent booking business trips, taptrip is an online platform that’s seriously efficient, personalised and award-winning. It brings every aspect of booking a business trip into one place, tracking costs and travellers, synchronising availability with a traveller’s calendar and allowing centralised booking for flights, trains, hotels and taxis.

Business travel costs SMEs in the UK around £40 billion, and three quarters of that is unmanaged spend across multiple platforms^[1] that can lead to companies wasting huge sums of money and time.

taptrip puts control back into the hands of businesses, while empowering the traveller. It creates a simple user experience that’s integrated with leading online travel providers.

Key features

• Designed around the user experience of business travellers and simplicity for managers
• The ability to search and book flights, hotels, trains, taxis and more, in one place
• Global inventory coverage through most of the largest global travel brands
• Predicts travel delays and adjusts itineraries accordingly and in line with a company’s travel policy
• Advanced duty of care traveller tracking and communication
• ‘Bleisure’ (business-leisure) so a traveller can make the most of their downtime
• Incentives for travellers to offset their carbon footprint

Value

The Barclays partnership

taptrip first worked at the Barclays Eagle Lab in Manchester, before participating in the 2019 New York Barclays Accelerator, powered by Techstars, programme. They were the first travel company on the Accelerator, receiving plenty of interest from stakeholders across the business.

Keen to share their proposition in detail, the taptrip team continues to engage with colleagues across the bank, refining ideas to make the platform attractive and useful to Barclays current and future customers and clients.

Since graduating from the Barclays Accelerator, taptrip has raised seed funding, including an investment from Barclays. In 2020, they closed a second, multi-million-pound round of seed funding, including further investment from Barclays. They've opened offices in London and Romania, with an imminent global rollout across Europe and the US.