CASE STUDY
How Discovery Inc. Embraced Agile Travel Tech
Key Highlights
Two companies, one agile vision
Multinational mass media company Discovery Inc. aims to showcase the passions, customs, and lifestyles of people across the world through the television brands they operate, specifically: the namesake Discovery Channel, Animal Planet, Science Channel, and TLC. When it came to Discovery’s search for a TMC that aligned with their unique culture, and believed in Discovery’s mission of giving voice to the unheard and the undiscovered, FCM was the easy choice.
Going for the goals
Like many companies around the world, Discovery’s global travel operations took an unplanned pause in 2020. What at first seemed like a hindrance soon transformed into an opportunity to use the travel pause to not only create fixes, but to innovate. Discovery’s objective for the new partnership with FCM was, among others, to: assess global travel policy, provide travellers with up-to-date travel risk information, ensure risk management protocols are being followed, create a sustainable approval process as travel resumes, and limit unused tickets.
A better way, together
As Discovery was reviewing their travel programme, FCM acquired the travel tech company, Shep. Originally, Shep was designed to reduce travel leakage, but through a collaborative process between FCM, Shep, and Discovery it transformed into an innovative communication tool: a redesigned browser extension with enhanced messaging for increased traveller safety. And increase safety messages it did: 37,954 to be exact. The extension triggers pop-up travel notifications when employees are looking for or booking business travel across multiple sites, including their online booking tool and consumer travel sites. Additionally, the extension serves as Discovery’s unused ticket tracker, hitting yet another one of their travel programme goals.
"It has become more important than ever to ensure that we get the message to travellers at the time they are making their travel booking. So, when FCM proposed Shep, I knew this was the answer for us.”
-Yukari Tortorich, VP of Global Travel Services, Discovery Inc.
Getting Ahead of the Game
In addition to policy goals, FCM helped Discovery accomplish another major objective: restarting their travel programme. 5,566 users were onboarded and trained using the FCM Extension, which is readily available in the Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge extension libraries. The Flexible API structure of the FCM Platform gave Discovery’s IT team the ability to integrate the Extension's single sign-on functionality into their already-existing framework.
Moreover, FCM configured the Extension to serve up to 14 different types of sustainability notifications to meet Discovery’s goal of encouraging sustainable booking.
2020 through 2021 put the solution for traveller risk to the test with everything from political unrest to the ongoing pandemic. Notifications from third-party data source Riskline were implemented into notifications for travellers. Overall, the FCM Extension served over 37,000 safety and risk notifications.
A bright future
The FCM Extension is proof of the power of partnership. Though the travel industry (and the world!) will always evolve, FCM will continue to create agile solutions that help travel programmes like Discovery’s stay current, efficient, and future-proofed.