World travelers are burdened with organizing a lot of details. But logging into numerous websites, keeping track of reservation emails, and juggling a dizzying number of apps doesn’t have to be part of your itinerary.
Traxo is an online travel service that tracks and organizes personal travel information, such as itineraries, loyalty account balances and receipts, and then displays it all on a convenient dashboard, either in the app or on the web. More than 200 travel sites are supported.
RewardExpert spoke with Traxo founder and CEO Andres Fabris about how Traxo makes global travel easier.
Founding of Traxo
Traxo was founded on the idea that many travelers aren’t interested in using travel agencies and prefer to manage travel arrangements themselves.
“In the past decade, the number of places where people can book travel has exploded,” says Fabris, a veteran of the travel industry who hails from Argentina.
Inspired by his desire to keep in touch with Harvard business school classmates leaving for jobs all over the world, he came up with the idea of Traxo in 2003. But at that point he envisioned a social app built around travel.
“Let’s see if we connect with people using travel sites,” Fabris says. “The idea was to create a social connection. But in the process we built an elegant dashboard.
After business school, and a stint at Travelocity, he established Traxo in 2008 because he found the need for travel organization to be even greater than it had been before.
What Traxo Offers
“It sounds wonderful to have so much choice, but there’s a hidden cost. Travel information lives across many sites,” says Fabris.
So Traxo collects all of the information and displays it on a single dashboard — doing for travel what Mint does for personal finance. As Fabris describes it, “Traxo takes out the chaos, and organizes information in one place.”
Fabris is a long-time, and long-distance, traveler, so he understands the complexity of travel. A single trip may generate travel details across numerous sites. Airlines, hotel chains, and rental car agencies all have their own apps. It can be enough to drive you back to using paper.
“A lot of people will print out their reservations and file them in a folder,” says Fabris.
But unlike that sheaf of papers in a manila folder, the information on your Traxo dashboard is continually updated. You’re alerted to flight delays, gate changes and more as they happen.
Traxo has access to data from 80 airlines around the world. In addition, Traxo tracks loyalty data, such as miles, points and expiration dates. For programs that don’t authorize Traxo to collect details, there’s an email fallback method. For example, the biggest air carriers in the U.S. — American, United and Delta — don’t participate.
According to Fabris, these airlines want more control over their passengers’ online activity, so Traxo’s system scans your email (with your permission) and pulls travel details into your dashboard similarly to the way Google Trips does. But Traxo works with any email provider, Fabris points out.
Traxo Perks
Each users has a Traxo Travel Score, ranging from 0 to 100. It’s calculated by a variety of metrics such as miles traveled and number of destinations. Members eventually unlock elite status to access extra benefits or perks. In the past, perks have included free Avis and Budget car rentals, free airfare on Southwest Airlines, magazines subscriptions, luggage and other benefits.
Fabris says there are more partnerships and more perks in the pipeline.