Travelport has announced that it has invested in the travel technology company, Locomote, acquiring a 49 per cent share.

Locomote has developed a platform to empower corporations in the seamless management of their travel, authorisation and procurement processes, including corporate traveller profile management, pre-trip approvals and duty of care capabilities.

The platform has been designed ab initio for the mobile commerce world by Locomote’s team of developers based in Melbourne, Australia. 

In turn, the Locomote platform uses all of Travelport’s Universal Profile, Universal Record, travel policy engine and Travelport’s state of the art Universal

Application Programming Interface, from which it obtains real time access to Travelport’s content, including low cost and network carriers, airline ancillary products, car rental and all of the industry leading, broad range of hotel properties and rates that Travelport now distributes. 

The platform has further been developed to enable easy integration of third-party, complementary applications that an individual corporation might want to add to its travel and/or authorisation processes.

This includes multiple expense management systems, corporate booking tools and other add on services, however, crucially, all within the same corporate user experience, workflow and data management capabilities.

Gordon Wilson, president and chief executive, Travelport commented: “Through this strategic investment in Locomote, we have significantly strengthened our offering to both corporates and TMCs from an end to end customer experience perspective.

“Locomote has been, and will continue to be, totally focused on what corporations and their corporate travellers want, in order to make the management of their travel an empowered, improved and mobile user experience, leveraging all of the latest technology and content that Travelport brings.

“We are excited about the reaction received from the initial companies that have experienced the Locomote product line, including the ease of deployment and user adoption. 

“We believe that further assets Travelport has recently acquired, such as the corporate hotel booking company, Hotelzon, will add even more differentiated content to the Locomote offering in the near future.”

Locomote already names organisations such as ANZ Bank, World Vision, Medibank, Allen & Overy and Glencore as users of the Locomote Travel Management Platform.