Hot 25 Travel Startups for 2024: Blockskye

Blockskye

Headquarters: Boston

co-CEOs: Brook Armstrong and Michael Share

Website: Blockskye

Founding date: 2017

Investment: undisclosed

Blockskye is a
disruptive leader in corporate travel and indirect procurement. We offer an
end-to-end solution for corporate travel management in partnership with Kayak.

Our
platform places corporate buyers in direct contact with suppliers, to reduce
costs, eliminate reconciliation, and offer true omnichannel content.
Blockskye’s revolutionary payment and settlement solution replaces credit
cards, invoices, and expense reports, creating a single source of truth which
frees travelers and finance teams from expense reports and invoicing.

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Founders Brook Armstrong and Michael Share

Strategic goals for 2024

Travelers want to shop,
book, change, cancel, and upgrade when and where they want: on Kayak or on the
United app or the Marriott Bonvoy app. And they don’t want to hassle with
expense reports and keeping track of unused ticket credit.

It’s our job to meet travelers where they are and give them exactly what they
want. Suppliers also have increasingly strong points of view about how many
intermediaries should exist between them and their travelers — and how much
those middlemen should be paid.

We bring travelers and suppliers close together, on a global scale, while
minimizing middlemen, opacity, and outdated business models on an entirely new
stack drawing from true direct, NDC, aggregator and GDS content with a
single-point-of-service on a global scale. 

Lessons learned since founding

Travel agencies used to
make 10% commission on every ticket sold anywhere in any market in any class at
all times. When airlines took that away in the ‘90s, some people were quite
upset. But the world continued on.

Today, bold and innovative suppliers are finding new ways to delight travelers,
and once again, people are pretty upset about it. But history repeats itself,
and the world will continue on.

Despite a strong 2023, IATA shares that airlines will average a profit margin
of 1.2% — while many other actors in the system will have margins well over
10%. The imbalance comes at the expense of traveler satisfaction, efficiency
and savings, and it’s unsustainable. Working alongside Kayak, bold suppliers,
leading corporate buyers and their travelers, we’re excited to usher in a new
era.

Watch Blockskye CEO Brook Armstrong talk about the company at The Phocuswright Conference in Fort Lauderdale in the video below.