Earlier this month, Bilt opened its platform, Bilt OS for Hospitality, to travel advisors, giving them a booking platform that includes a trip and itinerary builder, Sion commission-tracking capabilities and an agentic AI concierge assistant. Bilt, which operates a larger loyalty program and hospitality platform enabling members to earn reward points on rent and mortgage payments, has been making inroads into the B2B travel space this year, including its May acquisition of Sion. Jamie Biesiada, editor of content innovation and retail, sat down with Richard Kerr, Bilt's general manager of travel, at Virtuoso Travel Week, shortly after he announced the hospitality platform's opening to advisors on Aug. 9.
Richard Kerr
Q: What kind of reception are you getting?
A: A lot of excitement because it's a real, tangible product, and it's not a coming-soon kind of deal.
Q: You don't view this as something where an advisor would drop everything they currently use to come on your platform, right? It's more additive?
A: Think of everything Bilt has done, starting in the home, in the neighborhood and now in travel, as an orchestration layer that sits on top of the systems that you use. They can finally all talk together because of the integrations that we have. We know that agencies and advisors all have their individual workflows, their individual systems -- some homegrown and home-built systems, some off-the-shelf CRM things. It would be very disruptive to have to unplug everything and try and figure out something else.
The operating system sits on top of all of these. You can read your CRM. You can read your book of business. Sion's business is looking into the book of business that we have on the backside that is now inside this platform we have today. The goal is to be as least disruptive as possible.
Q: What are your biggest hurdles moving forward? Travel agency technology is not an uncrowded space anymore. It's really ramped up in the past couple of years. Is that an impediment or a good thing?
A: I think it's always a great thing because you have people from outside of the space, like Bilt, who have incredible resources where we can come in and say, "Hey, let's try to solve this." And I have talked to many people who have been in the space for a long time, many people who are new entrants like us. I think it's a great thing that everybody's finally investing in this because there are some legacy technologies that the infrastructure has to operate off a GDS. I think all of us coming together, going to the GDSs and saying, "Hey guys, what is it that we can do to really solve some of the inefficiencies here?"
If it's just me doing that, we probably wouldn't get very far. If everybody else in the space is having those conversations, we're probably getting a lot further. Because in three or four years, nobody's picking up the phone to book travel. The next gen is all digital. We have to figure this stuff out.
That's also the hurdle: It's getting systems that were designed in the '70s to really be able to handle the demand that we have.
Q:What's coming next for Bilt in the travel space?
A: We immediately said, "This is not the finish line, this is the start." The entire mindset has been, we're going to get to Aug. 9, we're going to have an amazing product and we are in listen-and-learn-and-build mode, because there are a lot of things that we want to do. AI enablement, No. 1. What is it that we can really take off an agency and advisor's plate so that they can spend their time servicing their clients [instead of spending] their time doing laborious back-office tasks?
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This interview was edited for length and clarity.