Wenrix Taps Data to Optimize TMC Bookings

BY MICHAEL B. BAKER AT BTN / JUNE 20, 2025 / CONTACT REPORTER

Wenrix might not yet be a household name among corporate travel buyers, but the technology company for the past several years has been partnering with travel management companies to optimize their bookings and efficiency and is pursuing a “very aggressive growth path” as its offerings expand, co-founder and CEO Amir Balaish said.

Launched about eight years ago, Tel Aviv-based Wenrix’s core product has been its predictive price assurance technology, using AI to predict how prices will change to ensure travelers get the best possible airfares and hotel rates for their trip. That includes both pre-ticket optimization—predicting when tickets will reach their lower price and automating the booking and ticketing process at the optimal time—and post-ticket optimization.

Wenrix’s first major customer was CWT, meaning it got its start on the business travel side, Balaish said. Online travel agencies also are a major customer source for Wenrix—it currently works with 12 of the 15 largest OTAs—and today, business travel comprises about 30 percent of its total business, he said. Via its TMC partners, which also include World Travel Inc., the technology currently helps support about 1,000 corporate programs, including “a few dozen from Fortune 500 companies.”

In developing the predictive price assurance technology, Wenrix sought to “automate the process end to end,” including the refund window and the approval process, and it has achieved an automation rate of about 98 percent, according to Balaish. For TMCs, it generates a revenue uplift of 2.5 percent to 3 percent of total air spending, he said.

Wenrix also has brought its price assurance technology into the search process. If a traveler has an airfare option, for example, that at the time of search was priced about what was acceptable to a traveler’s policy, but there is a high probability that flight later will be a lower price that is within policy, they would be able to book it with that lower price guaranteed by Wenrix.

Automation of price assurance in NDC channels has been a challenge, with variations by channel and by airline depending on their maturity with NDC, Balaish said. Even so, automation rates among NDC channels have been improving as well, with the void and approval process “fully automated” and the refund window automated to about 75 percent, based on a volume of $1 billion in NDC bookings—largely from OTAs, which were the early adopters, he said.

With its visibility across corporate negotiated fares, TMC fares, NDC fares and public fares, Wenrix also is able to provide data to corporations around their program—whether they are getting their negotiated fares or hotel rates, for example, or whether they could be negotiating better pricing. “We can show them a benchmark, because we see a lot of volume across NDC and EDIFACT, and can tell them where they can negotiate a bit better and improve,” Balaish said.

Wenrix also has been developing an “agent booster” tool, which combines its automation with Large Language Model technology that can read, parse and understand text as well as the agent operation and workflow. That tool currently is deployed on a “small scale” with one corporate travel agency, and early results have shown it can cut operations costs by 70 percent, Balaish said. Wenrix aims to expand that to full coverage with the agency within the next year, he said.

On its roadmap, Wenrix sees a “huge opportunity” on the corporate side in being able to leverage data that TMCs have on traveler’s personal preferences and patterns to further boost automation.

That innovation is part of Wenrix’s “goal to be fairly aggressive in both leisure and business travel” in terms of advancing its technology, he said. Over the past three years, the company has seen 40 to 60 percent growth year over year in both revenue and processed volume, and the company has signed “a pretty good amount of big logos” in the past six months that it is now in the process of deploying, he added.

Balaish said Wenrix is well positioned to help TMCs focus on their “white gloves” services while decreasing operational costs as they face increased competition from the newer tech-forward players that have entered the market in the past several years. “The big TMCs have an opportunity to learn how they can accelerate the deployment of technology and what they can do in order to improve efficiency,” he said.

— BTN TECH PROFILE