The Brain's Blog

Airlines

17th Swiss Travel Management Forum 2025 (STMF)

Industry meeting with foresight – The Swiss Travel Management Forum 2025 At the Swiss Travel Management Forum (STMF) on February 27, 2025, more than 150 industry experts, providers, and decision-makers from the travel industry gathered at the Dolder Grand Hotel in Zurich to discuss the future of business travel. TravelBrain was also involved in organizing the event and was onsite – with Adrian Matt moderating various keynotes and panels. Travel Manager lunch at the start of the event The “Travel Manager only” lunch before the official start of the STMF has become a tradition. This year, the acting president

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Airlines

Finass kicks off first NDC-integration in the local TMC world – Everything back to normal now?

Daniel Wittwer and his team at Finass Reisen in Wetzikon are once again making their mark on the local business travel market. As the first business travel specialist in Switzerland and perhaps even in Europe, Finass has fully integrated Lufthansa Group’s NDC solution into its own process landscape. This means that Finass will continue to have access to both the light fares which are currently no longer available in GDS and Lufthansa, Swiss, Austrian Airlines and Brussels Airlines’ so-called “Continuous Pricing”. However, the NDC connection also has its drawbacks.

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Airlines

The Event – Swiss Travel Management Forum 7 September 2017

This last week was very busy. Once again, I was invited to help mold the content for the summit that was held in The Sheraton, Zurich. And two days prior to the STMF, we with expenseBrain and my colleague Michael Zwickl had already appeared at the Finass Business Travel Workshop in Zurich’s World Trade Center. But of course there is always the same excitement to meet so many collegues from Travel Management and Suppliers. For the second time, the occasion was moderated by Traveltip and the patronage of the VDR, by Stefan Jäggi and Willy Schnyder – and they

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Airlines

UPSIDE Gift Cards – the new currency in Business Travel?

The founder of priceline.com, the entrepreneur Jay Walker, has set-up a new start-up company. UPSIDE is the name of the new, innovative company. With the help of big data, cloud computing and a mobile app, Upside promise business travellers gift cards for flexibility.    What’s the benefit of UPSIDE Gift Cards? It is an interesting approach. But what exactly is UPSIDE? UPSIDE currently is only available in the US. When a business traveller books his/her international trip with UPSIDE (for now only available as flight in combination with a hotel) the UPSIDE «Flexibility Engine» is checking various data bases

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Airlines

Google Flights – ready, steady, launch

Nothing spectacular…… A couple of days ago Google – without making a lot of noise -has launched Google Flights in Switzerland. At first sight – nothing spectacular and by far no revolution in Metasearch. All functionalities of the application are pretty well known from sites such as ebookers, Expedia, Momondo and Kayak/Swoodoo. … but everything has changed But then everything has changed for the industry. Not that every agent on the phone will notice this immediately – it will take some time. From now on and without knowing any of the above mentioned Metasearch Engines, every caller will potentially know

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