Tern Enters Booking Space, Starting with Tours and Insurance

Tern announced on Thursday that it was officially entering the travel booking space, adding what it hopes is the first of many partners that will bring their products directly into the Tern platform, allowing advisors to book their clients’ vacations without leaving the system.

The initial move includes a handful of partnerships. One is the tour company Project Expedition, which will place its full catalog of experiences and tours onto Tern. The others are four insurance companies: Arch RoamRight, Faye, Trawick, and Travel Insured International.

The goal of these additions is to make it easier for travel advisors using Tern to seamlessly add either a day tour, an experience, or an insurance product onto a client’s booking. Both Project Expedition and the insurance partners represent common gaps in an advisor’s workflow, Tern said. Having these products readily and easily available on the same platform advisors use to manage their bookings will help fill those spaces, boost advisor efficiency, and help increase the overall value of the booking.

“Advisors have been asking for this,” said CEO David Shull in the announcement. “They want to work faster and serve clients better without having to leave the Tern platform.”

The integration will also help smaller suppliers, like DMCs or small tour companies, by providing them with a technology integration platform they might not have been able to invest in previously.

What does this mean for advisors and agencies?

The announcement represents a significant shift for Tern, and one that the team expects to expand in the future by adding more supplier partners, including cruise lines and hotels. However, Tern does not intend to grow outside of its established lines as a technology platform.

Speaking to TMR, Shull made it clear that Tern’s intentions are not to be or function as a host agency, consortia, or anything similar. “We are a technology platform only,” he said.

Shull told TMR that bookings will not be directed through a separate IATA or agency code, and there are no plans for Tern to do that. To the supplier, bookings made through Tern will look the same as if an advisor booked through the supplier’s back end. All bookings made via Tern will be credited and commissioned to the booking agency just as they are outside of Tern.

“There are no plans to ever encroach on the relationship,” Shull said. “There are tech platforms out there that are trying to become the host agency, and they see it as the path to capture economic value in the space. We believe that is wrong.”

The goal, which has always included this kind of product addition, is to be a fully integrated, all-in-one platform for advisors, a mission that requires these additional functions.

“It’s really been a pretty consistent part of our vision since we started,” Shull told TMR. “Internally, we talk about Tern being a three-sided marketplace that connects the traveler to the advisor to the supplier. Such a massive part of that is how you collaborate with suppliers.”

Tern already has partnerships with a number of hosts, including Legato and TPI (head of marketing Grace Van Hollebeke confirmed to TMR that it expects to extend the TPI partnership soon). “We see this as a net benefit to them, too,” Van Hollebeke said. “We want to support them and help them grow, and doing this is part of that mission.”