Did you know all the business travelers of Rocketrip actually use Rocketrip? We realized we don’t share enough of our own savings and rewards stories, which brings us to this new blog series: Rocketrip on Rocketrip. Every month we’ll be introducing a new team member to share behind-the-scenes travel stories.
As part of Rocketrip’s partnerships team, I’ve been putting months of work into our Concur Fusion plans and even advanced booked my flights (21 days out for bonus rewards on top of my Price to Beat savings). We’re a Concur App Center partner, so Rocketrip was going to have a large presence at Fusion — including a booth, three speaking engagements, and the return of our huge Oasis happy hour.
In addition to my instant rewards savings and booking an off-peak flight for $150 savings on the trip to Orlando, my teammates decided to go in together on an Airbnb instead of staying at the conference hotel. Separately, four of us would each have spent around $200/night on hotel rooms; together, we found a great deal on this 5 bedroom house ten minutes away from the convention for $179/night. (If you’re keeping track, that’s $4,000 – $716 = $3,284 savings, with the savings split between us travelers and Rocketrip’s bottom line.)
The way colleagues splitting an Airbnb works within the Rocketrip platform is each traveler generates their own Price to Beat. The person who is expensing the Airbnb then just needs to let Rocketrip support know the names of the colleagues sharing it, for points allocation. This is my preferred hotel option for all trips because Airbnbs are a ton of fun, and they offer excellent bonding experiences with your colleagues — the Orlando home looked so cozy!
Consistently choosing Airbnb over hotels has allowed me to bank about $2,500 worth of Rocketrip points over the last year. With my plunder, I purchased noise cancelling headphones that I cherish dearly, a PS4 for when I’m not on the road, and a $300 Disney gift card which I used on our family vacation to Disneyland last November. The savings to the company are amazing, but hearing the stories of how travelers use their points is by far my favorite part about Rocketrip.
Unfortunately, as you probably suspected, the entire Concur Fusion event moved to digital only in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our travel — along with approximately 23% of other travel that went through Rocketrip at that time — needed to be cancelled. Fortunately, our integration with Concur Travel made it seamless to ensure no Rocketrip rewards were given out for trips that didn’t happen: our platform does not award points until final expenses are submitted and approved for the trip.
Of course, this event was going to be a major relationship-building tool for my team and I’m disappointed it was (rightfully) not able to move forward. But business travel will resume, and I’ll be back to talk about future trips here.
Reid Fay is a manager of strategic partnerships at Rocketrip.
Stay tuned for future episodes of Rocketrip on Rocketrip!
