Introducing Switchfly PRO feat. Nowell Outlaw, CEO

Welcome to Travel Buddy

In this episode of the Travel Buddy podcast, Nowell, the CEO of Switchfly, discusses the complexities and benefits of setting up white-label travel platforms and introduces Switchfly PRO.

Key points include:

1. Complexities of Building a Travel Platform: Building a travel platform involves navigating various complexities such as multiple supplier partnerships, air carriage rules, and state-specific regulations. Even processing credit card payments is challenging due to the high-risk category of the travel industry.

2. Merchant of Record and Fulfillment Services: Switchfly acts as a merchant of record with its own fulfillment services, allowing it to integrate quickly with existing platforms. This includes managing operations, processing, fraud, and supplier connections.

3. Challenges in Credit Card Processing: Securing a merchant processor for travel transactions is extremely difficult and can take months. This process involves dealing with 3D secure, international currency top-ups, and supporting various card types.

4. Switchfly's Expertise: With 20 years of experience, Switchfly has the expertise to manage the intricate details of travel technology and services, making it easier for other companies to offer travel rewards without building their own systems.

5. White-Label Travel Platforms: Switchfly offers customizable travel solutions that can be branded to match a company's look and feel, providing seamless user experiences and rapid implementation. Their goal is to enable clients to launch travel solutions in as little as one day.

6. Global Presence and Scalability: Switchfly supports a global footprint of hotels and various suppliers, making it possible to offer travel solutions worldwide. They have successfully implemented programs in 148 countries, supporting multiple currencies and languages.

7. Machine Learning and Customer Support: Switchfly incorporates machine learning to provide personalized travel recommendations and operates a dedicated call center to assist travelers with issues, ensuring high customer satisfaction.

8. Customer Obsession: Switchfly is focused on customer satisfaction, measuring response times and ensuring quick resolutions to travel issues, which is crucial for maintaining a positive travel experience.

9. Excitement for Switchfly PRO: The new Switchfly PRO platform aims to provide fast, efficient travel solutions, allowing companies to quickly stand up rewards and recognition programs. This new approach is expected to revolutionize the industry by providing a faster and more efficient way to offer travel benefits.

10. Personal Travel Plans: Nowell shares his excitement about an upcoming trip to hike the Rob Roy Trail in Scotland, highlighting the importance of travel in his life.

Overall, the episode emphasizes the intricate nature of the travel industry and how Switchfly's expertise and technology make it easier for companies to offer travel rewards efficiently.

Transcript

Welcome to Travel Buddy, presented by Switchfly. In this podcast, we talk about all things travel, rewards, and loyalty. Let’s get to it. 

 

Hello, Nowell, and welcome back to the travel buddy podcast. We had you on last time and I feel like there was a lot more we could talk about. You are the CEO of switch fly. And so you have a lot of innovation coming, a lot of new products coming, and I’m excited to dig into today where we’re going to talk about white label travel platforms, so private travel and, uh, and getting customers up and running with a travel platform. 

 

So, my first question to you is, it is I guess this is a question. Is it easy to build a travel platform? Cause from what I’ve heard from you guys and the way we’ve talked about it in the past, this is not something you can just like do, you know, you can’t just like start up travel and, uh, and, and one of the things that you mentioned is credit card processing that just that thing that you think like, Oh, cool.

 

I’m going to use this, you know, this vendor is going to be fine. And we’re going to, we’re going to move along, move our payments along. But, uh, you’re put into a. A really high risk category that makes it pretty expensive simply because you’re a travel provider. So tell me a little bit of the complexities of, of kind of turning on a travel platform if you were to do this in house or, or maybe, you know, some other providers out there that, that you guys just are able to do this really quickly.

 

Um, but, but I know there’s a lot of complexity going into that.

 

Yeah. So, you know, the phone call we get, interestingly enough, is people are like, Oh, well, we can build what you do. And your, your answer is take it, take a step back and you really have to understand the, the complexities of travel, right? And, you know, you have multiple different supplier partners, you have air carriage rules, you have, you know, accreditation and licensure, you know, even in the United States, there are specific states.

 

Like Hawaii where you actually, if you wanna sell travel to a consumer in Hawaii, you actually have to open a Hawaiian bank account. 

 

Hmm.

 

Like there’s specific rules. California has rules, right? Diff different states have different rules just specific to travel and you know, switch Fly’s a 20-year-old travel tech company.

 

And what we realized two and a half years ago was, you know, we’re going to expand our reach by. Being able to act as what’s called the merchant of record and having our own fulfillment services. And so what that enables us to do is basically bolt on very quickly to existing platforms, right? So if you’re a loyalty program, if you’re a HR tech rewards and recognition program, you can basically have travel in a box.

 

If you, if you think about that way, Um, you know, people talk, think about SAS solutions. This is really a travel as a solution that you can bolt up. The trick is travel is not just a tech. It’s also a service, right? So we have fulfillment operations, merchant of service, um, processing, fraud and abuse, all the supplier connections.

 

And then there’s the actual website, right? That you get to. The moat that you have to cross to be able to service travel is a massive one, right? So you pointed out the, the credit card things. I’ll just tell you a story really quick, which is when we were looking to do this, right? Our CFO, Oh, this isn’t a big deal.

 

Let’s, you know, and we’re owned by Golub Capital. So we have a massive kind of, You know, equity partner is our as our owner, things like that. This should be easy, right? Hey, phone call. Let’s talk to JP Morgan for our credit card processing. Let’s talk to, you know, all these different people and, uh, You would get on the phone with them, and you would go through all this stuff, and then you would, you would talk to them, Oh, this is great, and then you’d go have a meeting, and then you’d get to underwriting, and they’d say, And what exactly do you do?

 

And you’d check the travel box, and they’d go, Whoa, whoa, whoa, we didn’t know this was travel, like, and my joke internally is, You know, I think it’s easier to sell drugs. With a credit card than it is to sell travel. You’re in the same category, right? And it took a monumental effort to get a merchant of record to support us.

 

Right. As a travel company. And that process took probably six months, just that, right. And that’s not dealing with 3d secure, right? If you’re doing international, all the different currency top ups that people want to do. Being able to support all the different card types, right? Just in and in there. And it’s a, it’s a huge uplift to be able to just to, just to process a credit card.

 

And then you have all the other stuff that relates to travel. 

 

What I’m hearing is I’m very grateful. I’m not in the travel industry right

 

It’s yeah, it’s, it’s super complex, right? And, and unfortunately, you know, um, I’ve been here two and a half years as a CEO. I don’t have a travel background, right? And it was interesting journey. It’s probably, Good that you’re, you know, it’s kind of the blind walking into the forest going, I don’t think this is going to be a bad hike.

 

And 20 miles later, you’re like, why did I go on this journey? And, you know, we made it through, but I’m telling you, like one of our customers is a huge, you know, multi billion dollar rewards company. And they evaluated. Trying to build it themselves. And after six months, they said, we are not doing this because it’s super complex.

 

It’s super hard. There’s rules. There’s international rules. There’s, you know, even just North American rules on a state by state level. So you really have to pay attention to all the moving parts. And I think that, um, that’s why white label travel platforms exist, because a lot of companies don’t want to build that.

 

And it’s, and it’s a Pure expertise, right? So you have to have people that work for you that understand all of the travel intricacies in order to pull it off.

 

Hmm. So I’m, I’m, what I’m picking up is, one of the other calls you get is, Hey, we want to do travel rewards for our employees. We don’t want to build it ourselves because of all the reasons you just mentioned. Is there a, a possibility that we could just kind of plug into the switch, fly, you know, system and the inventory and all of that, but can we make it look like our brand?

 

Is that, is that right? Is that Yeah.

 

For sure. And that’s, we talked about that last week, but you know, specific to employers, we, um, basically have this product called go, um, which is, you know, go dot switch, fly. com, a little marketing plug, but it’s designed for an employer to basically. Enable their employees to have access to member only kind of rates in a closed loop network.

 

Um, and we can do that for employers. This is not replacing corporate travel. There’s a lot of great companies that do corporate travel. What we’ve found is that, um, employers want to give out rewards to employees for rewards and recognition in the form of a travel certificate or travel reward. And that switch flight folks like go is designed to do that. 

 

So this platform, what you’re calling Switchfly PROis, uh, tell me a little bit about like the, the ideal audience you’re, you’re seeing for where this would really be a great fit for that kind of company.

 

So, um, there’s really a couple of different things we’re seeing in the market and how we fit. So, you know, there’s enterprise with so that if you think about the white label travel, um, market, there’s enterprise level solutions. And we do that. We manage and process travel for, um, a variety of, you know, enterprise clients at a global scale.

 

And then you have, you know, Um, I will say the lower tier people who are, you know, a billion dollars in sales, let’s say, and they want a travel solution that can bolt in. But it needs to look like theirs, right? It needs to have the same UX and design. And, uh, you know, it needs to basically be a seamless user experience.

 

And, uh, What we’ve realized is that we need ability. We needed an ability to go really fast, right? And the, you know, in the, in the go to market today of sass technology and things like that, companies that are taking on multi million dollar implementation projects is very small and, you know, those are, I jokingly tell people those are like, Whale hunting kind of projects.

 

You send the sales team out in the boat. Maybe they get one in 18 months. Maybe they don’t write and they come back and they have to restock and maybe get a deal in our world. Being able to close and sell to more loyalty rewards and and rewards and recognition programs in a faster way was key to kind of our success.

 

And so SwitchFlight PROis designed to stand up a rewards and recognition program or, you know, an HR tech rewards and recognition program very quickly, right? So as an example, uh, we did a customer about two months ago and from kickoff to go live was basically 27 days, right? And we’re compressing that even faster so that some of the things we’re working on, my goal is one day.

 

Right. So a customer can come in and say, I want to do this. And some of the things we’ve done with no code, um, and, and basically rapid implementation. I want to be able to tell the customer you can be live tomorrow. Right. And because no one else, no one really does that in the marketplace there. There’s a lot of at the At the larger enterprise level, there’s a lot of coding and a custom, custom things that have to be done.

 

And those projects can take, you know, 6, 9, 12, 18 months, right? And that’s a different kind of delivery model. And for us, there’s so many companies that are loyalty programs that are rewards companies that are not, you know, they’re not a huge, massive credit card company, right? And they need to add travel quickly, and we have a solution that could do that.

 

Yeah. Amazing. Amazing. One day would be wild. Now I know it’s something that you mentioned before is okay. So you can get stood up really quickly, but then it’s also, uh, Uh, You know, reaching, having a kind of a global presence. Like if, if global, uh, a global organization wanted to travel, uh, can you, can you talk a little bit more about that, about like, okay, so I want to go not only just to Hawaii or California or whatever, but I want to go to, you know, uh, Eastern Europe or, you know, Africa or something.

 

How do you, how does that work?

 

Yeah, I mean, it’s, you know, Switchfly is a global company and, you know, we have employees all around the world. There’s two components to that, right? One is where a consumer wants to travel. We service a global footprint of hotels. We have various industry suppliers kind of that we work with and, you know, different industry suppliers for hotels.

 

An example are very good at different regions, right? So 1 supplier might be really good with, you know, Asian and that area. And then you have another 1 that’s really good at Europe. You have another 1 that’s great at North America or South America. And so, you know, we basically have supply relationships with all of those, right?

 

Okay. I think the other piece though, from a loyalty platform, looking for a white label platform is, can it be global? Right? And, and, you know, we just rolled out another loyalty program provider. Uh, it’s 148 countries globally with 30 different currency top ups with, you know, I think eight different languages that the sites are built in and things like that.

 

And we did that in less than six months. Right. Right. And at that scale, right, you need a platform that’s designed to be able to basically do that fast, right? Because it’s, you know, companies want to do this on a, on a global brand scale and, and what we see a lot of is people who are like, well, you know, we can launch in North America or we can launch in, you know, just these countries.

 

But then it’s going to take a whole lot of time to get the rest of it. Or, you know, it’s specifically designed for English, right? Well, guess what? There’s a whole lot of people in the world who don’t speak English, right? And so you have to be able to deal with all those cross cross cultural issues. In current including currencies.

 

It’s, you know, it’s such a goofy thing, but. We had a customer that came to us, a new customer, and the biggest reason why they left their other supplier was their top up currency was always in dollars. And they’re like, you know, the consumers get really frustrated because, you know, if you’re in Australia and you’re seeing dollars and then, you know, it’s just not right.

 

And why they couldn’t make it in Australian dollars. And you’re like, Oh yeah, we’re native. Like why we shouldn’t have this point of view that the United States currency and everyone around the world is just going to process into dollars themselves. Like you can do that on the back end, but you need to be customer facing first. 

 

know, um, uh, a core component of this is you’ve got, uh, machine learning technologies baked into, uh, switch fly. And then you’ve also got call center operations, which is to say that if you know, traveler gets stuck abroad, there’s somebody, there’s a problem. There’s a person that they can talk to and get

 

For sure.

 

So tell me how, how does this work with, with Switchfly pro? Do you still get that machine learning capability? Do you still get the call center and how does that work globally? Is that still, that still works? So, so if I’m a, you know, rewards recognition provider, I bolt into Switchfly, I get all of that

 

Correct. Everything. Yeah, call center, support, you know, so if a traveler is, um, you know, stuck or their hotel rooms cancel, things like that, it’s all provided, right, by us. And that’s, um, that’s what you need, right? So I’m, you know, we have a, uh, Mission statement or core values assessment that is near and dear to my heart and one of the core tenants of switch fly is customer obsession.

 

And so for us, like, being customer facing is super important and basically being able to satisfy that customer quick is also super important. So the meeting I have to go to right after this call is focused on measuring all of our customer. Customer inbounds. How are we, you know, dealing with these things?

 

Are they being dealt with in a timely manner? Because it is the servicing aspect of travel is when people get really frustrated, right? We canceled your flight, you know, your hotel, your room’s not ready, all that kind of stuff. And if you pick up the phone and all of a sudden you’re on the, you know, call center line and they say, please hold for 45 minutes.

 

That can really wreck your vacation, right? And so for us, it’s like we’re not going to have 45 minute wait times, right? I want people to pick up in, like, less than 10 seconds. And it’s important that people have a really good experience.

 

Amazing. Amazing. I have three quick questions for you. Let’s say 90 seconds each. Um, one is what is something that is counterintuitive or something you wouldn’t think of, or something that comes to mind that like you really wish people would know, but it’s not obvious that they would know about, uh, setting up a white label, um, travel platform, like what you guys have,

 

Um, you know, I think that’s. Not obvious. I mean, there’s people that talk to, um, you know, lots of the industry suppliers, so lots of people have white level platforms switchfly. I jokingly tell people is like the silent, silent partner, because we’re driving a massive amount of bookings that, that people don’t know who we are.

 

Um, and I think the, the unknown thing is there are different rates and there are different margins that you can get depending on how you do that. If you go with. Just one brand, right? You’re only get their solution and guaranteed, like in our case, you know, we’re constantly looking behind the scenes with our machine learning for, you know, who’s got the best deal, right?

 

How am I able to maximize the margin across this product across these suppliers? And that makes a difference, right? When you start looking at different hotels, and you’re talking about, you know, if you’re driving 100 million dollars a year, In travel bookings, you know, 1%, 2 percent difference starts to make a real meaningful impact in your bottom line. 

 

what most excites you about switch fly pro. What’s the thing that you’re just like, I cannot wait for this to happen.

 

Um, you know, so switchfly pro my, my joke internally, and I guess I’ll let this out to the world is that, um, in a lot of ways, and I’ve been doing my tech my whole career, right? Enterprise stuff for insurance companies and, and crazy big projects. And I described those projects is basically a plow horse.

 

That shows up to a racetrack pulling a plow, right? They’re very slow. They’re very complex. They take a lot of sales energy, right? To get those things done And and there is when you’re doing enterprise deals They take a lot of time resource to get them both closed and then stood up with switch flight pro In, in my view of the world is I have a resource, right?

 

And that instead of showing up to the racetrack with my plow horse pulling my plow, I now have a resource that’s going to go faster. Right? And I have an ability to engage more people and close more opportunities in the marketplace because I think a lot of, um, Of other competitors are still showing up with the plow horse.

 

And if you have the plow horse solution and you’re trying to do the pro go fast kind of deals, it’s really hard because you don’t have the tech framework to go really, really fast. 

 

I love that. It’s like a whole new paradigm on this industry and something I’ve always loved about switch fly, uh, over the years is, is just, you guys are always trying to find that, what is that new thing that is just going to change the game? And you’re always working toward that. And I really appreciate that about y’all.

 

I met. With a guy last week, who’s worked, he works at a large industry supplier, brand name travel company, right? And, um, I was talking about pro and he’s like, I can’t believe this. He’s like, I’ve been looking for this for like six years where someone who could basically stand it up quick and, and just get it rolling.

 

He’s like, this is going to be great. Right. And they, you know, they want to do joint marketing with us. I can’t tell you who it is, but it’s. You’re like, Oh my gosh, what do I do now? What if they’re generating leads for this thing? So it’s pretty fun.

 

that’s super cool. I love that. Okay. Last question. Uh, where’s some place that you’re super excited to travel? So just anywhere, a dart on the map.

 

Uh, I’m going to hike the, um, Rob Roy trail in Scotland in the last week in September. So that’s my next upcoming trip. You can’t run a travel company and not travel.

 

Yeah, you got to, right? You got to live it. Very cool. Very cool. Well, Nowell, thank you so much. Uh, I know your time is precious. I really appreciate you giving us a low down on switchfly pro and I’m excited to see this get to market cause I think it’s going to be a really cool thing. So thank you so

 

thanks Brandon.

 

hopefully we’ll talk soon.

 

All right. Have a great day.

 

All right.

 

See ya. Cheers. Bye.