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Clarity, an award-winning leader in corporate travel, meetings, and events management, has dramatically transformed its service offering through the strategic integration of the TravelTime API. This case study highlights the impact of time-based search on customer satisfaction, cost savings, innovation, and more.
Managing everything from booking hotels, meeting rooms, car hire, flights, to getting people home in an emergency, Clarity strives to be the go-to for any company requiring travel management support.
Clarity also has a big focus on traveler wellbeing and sustainability, with accessibility, traveler safety, and green choices sitting at the centre of their work.
The partnership with TravelTime has been a game-changer, enhancing the user experience by prioritising accurate journey planning and sustainability.
Six-figure savings compared to using Google
Cached data to drive efficiency
Winning new customers and retaining existing ones
“Using the TravelTime API, the world is my oyster when it comes to innovation and R&D. It helps us completely distinguish ourselves versus the competition.”
Carl Law
Executive Director of Technology at Clarity
Why Clarity needed a Distance Matrix API
Before the TravelTime integration, Clarity's MeetingsPro solution relied on straight-line distance searches. It allowed users to search for meeting rooms by distance, often resulting in logistical challenges for clients, such as unexpected detours around rivers or motorways.
This approach led to a disconnect between expected and actual travel times to meeting venues, highlighting the need for a more sophisticated solution.
With TravelTime, Clarity has introduced a journey time search and now includes multi-modal transport insights during a venue search. “Now when a user books a meeting and it says that it will take them 15 minutes to walk there, it will actually take them 15 minutes,” Carl Law, Executive Director of Technology at Clarity says.
“We wanted to be the first to market to include walking times rather than just straight-line distances in a meetings venue search algorithm.”Carl Law
Executive Director of Technology at Clarity
The TravelTime Solution
The integration of TravelTime's API marked a significant leap forward, introducing journey time searches that incorporate multi-modal transport data. This not only improved the accuracy of travel times but also enhanced the overall user experience by providing realistic expectations for journey durations.
Carl Law explains: “It’s incredibly important for a user to know how easy a venue is to get to, and the last thing we wanted them doing is having to worry about going onto Google Maps to get the details. We want to make our platform as valuable as possible to our users, and adding in a TravelTime search does just that.”
“It makes my life and the product team’s so much easier when we’re sat in front of customers trying to retain their business or win new business. It helps us completely distinguish ourselves versus the competition.”
Clarity's decision to partner with TravelTime over other providers was influenced by several factors, including:
- Cost-effectiveness
- Ability to cache results
- Superior data privacy protections
- API performance
“The cost of TravelTime is insignificant compared to the likes of Google - and I’m getting so much more for my money.”Carl Law
Executive Director of Technology at Clarity
“Our Google costs had already jumped up massively when they switched from having a fixed licence fee to the usage-based model. If we’d tried to implement the new meetings booking features using the Google API we were looking at potentially spending 6 figures annually with them - our fixed price TraveTime licence is a fraction of that.”
Instead, the fixed-price licensing model offered by TravelTime presented significant savings, especially when compared to the usage-based pricing model of alternatives like Google. Similarly, “the ability to cache the results from the TravelTime API means that [Clarity] can much more easily manage costs.”
Rapid integration and immediate results
The process of integrating TravelTime into Clarity's platform was highly efficient, with a proof of concept up and running within a day, and just two weeks to reach full production.
This quick integration has had a profound impact on Clarity's business, enhancing customer satisfaction and providing a competitive edge in the market.
Speaking about the ease of integration and quality of the documentation, Clarity says, “they are the best API docs I’ve seen in a long time.”
To make things even better, since the TravelTime API has been live, there have been no cases of downtime or any issue with the API.
What does the future look like?
Having proven the value of the TravelTime API in the MeetingsPro venue search algorithm, Clarity is now planning to maximise its usage for meetings optimisation.
“When you’ve got people coming from all different locations, where is the best place to meet in terms of travel times, cost, and sustainability. TravelTime will absolutely power that capability, not just with walking times but for all modes of transport.”
They are also going to integrate the API into the travel booking side of the business too, meaning it will be used in 80% of the business. “In the same way that we now power a meeting venue search algorithm using the TravelTime API, we are going to do the same for booking hotels and any other travel bookings.”
Because of TravelTime’s unlimited usage for a fixed price model, Clarity can explore and test new use cases without any impact on the cost. It’s a winning partnership that delivers incredible results.
Building a location search engine? Think TravelTime.
While Clarity works in the venue, hotel and travel booking search space, TravelTime API can be deployed in any location search engine to deliver multi-modal transport and journey time data.
Unlock the potential for higher conversions and happier customers by adopting this innovative approach to venue or location search.