Judges at the Business Travel Show's Innovation Faceoff selected traveller identity network Travlr ID as the winning technology, calling it a potential game-changer for "a long-standing issue and legacy pain" in the travel industry.
Travlr ID is building a decentralised service to manage identification, which founder and creator Gee Mann said could solve the problem of data fragmentation in the travel industry.
Travellers need to share profiles with a variety of sources, including agencies, booking tools, global distribution systems and other suppliers, and a lot of the profile management today still is managed in Excel, he said.
"The traveller profile is broken," Mann said. "There's very little innovation or interoperability … and data breaches are very common."
The blockchain-based Travlr ID is building a network where entities that want to interact with a profile can do so with the traveller or company's permission. That's in the form of both a mobile wallet for the traveller as well as a corporate platform.
"It is a permission network," Mann said. "If I would like to share with Uber just two fields and with an airline 50, I can have the controls with who I'm sharing with and how much."
Microsoft travel technology manager Steve Clagg, one of four judges on the panel, said decentralised identity was going to be a major issue across numerous industries and that travel was a good place to start.
"This really brings identity back into the hands of the traveller," Clagg said. "Every person has the right to own their own data. This is the direction we're going in."
Clagg said Travlr ID, in order to be successful, would need to build the right number of participants, persuade suppliers to yield control of customer data and persuade buyers to the value of participation. That includes the costs, as Mann said the ideal end customer will be the corporate user.
"If you can nail this, if you can put decentralised identity back into the hands of travellers and monetise it, you've got it all figured out," Clagg said.
Clagg also said Travlr ID needs to develop "clear, demonstrable use cases" to show the potential impact. Mann said he is in conversation with three travel management companies as potential partners.
Judges also named EY as an honourable mention in the Faceoff for its sustainable travel approval tool, presented by travel, meetings and event leader Karen Hutchings. The tool is moving EY toward its goal of net-zero carbon by 2025 and has already resulted in significant reduction in spending on air travel, she said.
With the tool, "you've achieved phenomenal behavioural change in a very short amount of time," said judge and Jyrney cofounder and CEO Daniel Price, who was the winner of last year's Faceoff. "We were really impressed that travel buyers are taking a lead in this area but also a little saddened that buyers are having to do this for themselves."
Kimberly Clark global meetings and events manager and global fleet manager Cindy Van der Elst and EY global innovation and technology leader Ian Spearing rounded out the judging panel.
Spearing recused himself from scoring his own firm's presentation.
Other participants in the Faceoff included extended stay travel marketplace 3Sixty, business travel technology add-on Tripkicks, corporate mobility platform HQ, QuadLabs booking technology Travog Corporate Travel and meeting data correction system The Data Angel.
The Business Travel Show Europe, like BTN Europe, is owned by Northstar Travel Group.
Andy Hoskins contributed to this report.