Steve Singh is one step closer to the “perfect trip.”
The Seattle-based business leader and investor, former CEO of companies including Concur and Docker, is leading a group of investors in the acquisition of Direct Travel Inc., a Colorado-based corporate travel management company, founded in 2011, with more than $300 million in annual revenue and 1,800 employees.
The deal is part of Singh’s longstanding effort to assemble the pieces necessary to deliver a seamless experience to corporate travelers. The vision dates back to his tenure with Concur, the travel and expense management giant that he founded in 1993 with his brother, Raj Singh, and their partner Mike Hilton.
In an interview this week, Steve Singh said he didn’t imagine continuing the quest after SAP acquired Concur for $8.3 billion in 2014. But the opportunity resurfaced through different companies and investments, and the challenge remained.
“I knew that a lot of the vision that we had around the ‘perfect trip’ really wasn’t complete,” he explained. “The technology architectures that were needed to make a seamless travel experience possible just were not there.”
Christal Bemont, former SAP Concur chief revenue officer and most recently CEO of Talend, was named Direct Travel’s new CEO as part of the announcement Tuesday morning, succeeding founder Ed Adams, who is retiring.
Singh, a managing director at Madrona Venture Group, will serve as Direct Travel’s executive chairman.
Investors participating in the acquisition of Direct Travel include Durable Capital Partners, Madrona, Top Tier Capital Partners, and Blackstone Credit & Insurance. Financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. The acquisition, announced Tuesday, has gone through regulatory review and been completed.
Singh said Direct Travel will partner closely with three other companies for which he also serves as executive chairman: Spotnana, a travel-as-a-service technology platform; Center, a corporate card and expense management platform; and Troop, a group meetings and events company.
Beyond the partnerships among those four companies, Singh said, the vision is to use open architectures and APIs to allow anyone to add value and improve upon the solutions they develop.
Corporate travel management is a key piece, offering comprehensive services to streamline business travel for organizations, including travel booking and planning, data and reporting, and policy compliance.
Singh said the investor group started looking at travel management companies a little more than a year ago. They were looking for a company with an exceptional reputation for client service, a focus on delighting travelers and companies, and a management team that could drive strong growth and profitability.
“Direct was really the only company we met with that fit that definition,” he said.
The company is growing 10% annually. Singh said that growth could improve to 15% to 20% in the next 12 months, while maintaining the company’s profitability.
Citing Bemont’s vision for the company as its new CEO, Singh said the goal is to build “the most admired, most innovative” travel management company in the world.
Singh said he believes AI will play a key role in transforming the corporate travel experience by enabling natural language booking experiences, automatically adjusting trips during disruptions, and reducing servicing costs by 30-40%. In the future Direct Travel will have an AI “copilot” as part of its offering, he said.
Direct Travel has about 80 locations around the world, with 40 people in Seattle, in addition to employees in Denver, Chicago, New York, Washington, D.C., and Atlanta.
With the acquisition, Singh said the investment group now has four of the five key pieces they need to reinvent the travel ecosystem. He expects them to get to the fifth piece sometime in the next year.
So what is that fifth piece? Asked for more details, Singh gave some clues.
“We think that the architecture and the technology stack for how hotel inventory is managed, how reservations and properties are managed, is too archaic, and is not open,” he said. “And we think that is a space that can get reinvented. Now imagine tying that into Spotnana, tying that into Troop, tying that into Center. And of course, into Direct Travel. So we think those five are very complementary to one another.”
