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Travel startup Fairjungle has achieved more growth during Covid's sanitary and economic crisis than before it. As part of B SMART's "Stakes & Priorities" section, journalist Jean Marc Sylvestre interviews Fairjungle co-founder and CEO Saad Berrada about the way the solution adapted to the pandemic's new travel constraints, aiding companies to manage considerations around CSR, carbon footprint, travel volume control, and traveller safety.
Video transcription
PRESENTER: Fairjungle is a smart business travel booking and management platform dedicated to SMEs. Its co-founder, Saad Berrada, is with us. What are its challenges and priorities in the face of the crisis? Let's start with the interview with Jean-Marc Sylvestre.
JEAN MARC SYLVESTRE: Hello, Saad. How are you doing?
SAAD BERRADA: I'm doing very well.
JEAN MARC SYLVESTRE: You are because you are in a sector that is still very damaged by the crisis, the business travel. We continue to do some business and we don't do any more travel.
SAAD BERRADA: So what is happening right now, indeed, of the sectors most depressed by the crisis, business travel. Except that there is a need for control over business travel that is stronger today with the current crisis.
JEAN MARC SYLVESTRE: What do you mean?
SAAD BERRADA: We need to control travel budgets. We need to control whether travel is justified or not, whether it is essential. We need to control the carbon impact of travel. And that's what our platform allows us to do. It is precisely to enable companies to monitor the consumption of their employees.
JEAN MARC SYLVESTRE: To optimize this expense, which is an investment.
SAAD BERRADA: Exactly. And historically, companies just thought about budgets and travel. They didn't think about traveler safety, they didn't think about the carbon impact of travel. And a solution like ours allows them to do that.
JEAN MARC SYLVESTRE: What does this change in your work method?
SAAD BERRADA: Well, we have completely changed the way we travel. Today, when you travel, you go to a platform, you look for a plane ticket to Marseille. It will propose you several proposals. The difference with Fairjungle is that you say I have to be at such and such a place, at such and such a time, and Fairjungle will compare the different ways of traveling, based on the carbon impact, based on the budget, and will proactively propose to the employees to favor the most eco-responsible options, for example.
JEAN MARC SYLVESTRE: It's a solution comparator?
SAAD BERRADA: Exactly. It's a multimodal comparator that will compare the different means of transportation and organize the employee's trips with a single search, and above all, it will allow the company to serve these economic and ecological issues.
JEAN MARC SYLVESTRE: I imagine that you have recurring annual or almost monthly contracts with clients?
SAAD BERRADA: So we change the agency's business model. Traditionally, it's with each transaction, there are fees. We have a SAS license system. So it's per active user per month. You just have to subscribe to a software and use our platform freely.
JEAN MARC SYLVESTRE: So what is new here in the immediate future is the introduction of health constraints in the journey. Do we have to do the test? Do you have to be vaccinated? How do you go about introducing all this?
SAAD BERRADA: So this is a very, very good point. Today, we didn't ask ourselves the question. Before, we had to go to New York, we took a ticket to go to New York. Today, we have to ask ourselves the question. I was saying the carbon impact, but what are the regulations in force in the country's airline? What technology allows is precisely to be integrated into these systems, to introduce health constraints into each trip and to say for such a trip is it justified, is it acceptable? What are the measures that need to be taken and potentially to say to the employees, well, for this trip, it is not accepted.
JEAN MARC SYLVESTRE: For example, for a trip to Singapore, I have to stay in a hotel for 7 to 8 days at my own expense, before I can leave. So you're obviously aware of all this?
SAAD BERRADA: That's exactly what the platform does, it centralizes all the health, ecological, carbon impact and budget information and tells employees, given all this information, is the trip justified? Shouldn't it be postponed or avoided? Avoid the carbon impact that comes with it or potentially it has the green light, and should be able to travel.
JEAN MARC SYLVESTRE: What's the state of the situation for a company like yours in a totally fragile, neuralgic sector? You know, you've lost most of the business for a while and you're gaining it back a little bit there or not?
SAAD BERRADA: So indeed, at the first crisis level had a loss of revenue, but then it's a little bit counterintuitive, but the last few months have been Fairjungle's best since its inception in 2017. And in fact, what's happening is that in a depressed industry, kind of like what happened with Airbnb in 2008, we're gaining so much market share in digitizing the industry, simplifying the management of placements that we're getting customers back, competition, plain and simple.
JEAN MARC SYLVESTRE: It's called Fairjungle.
SAAD BERRADA: Exactly. You can find us on the Internet. It's a mobile and web application, it installs directly.
JEAN MARC SYLVESTRE: Bad news Anaïs. I'm not going to Singapore.
PRESENTER: Thank you Jean-Marc. Thank you, Saad Berrada. You are the co-founder of Fairjungle, a smart travel booking and management platform for SMEs. Thank you for joining us. This is the end of this show. We'll see you tomorrow with some new entrepreneurs.
