A new start-up by Priceline.com founder Jay Walker will reward employees who are flexible about their business travel. By booking their hotel and flight packages on the soon-to-be-released mobile app Upside, they will save their companies 5-15 percent off travel costs, and personally earn up to $200 in free e-gift cards to popular retailers for each trip.

This new model for booking business travel is made possible thanks to advances in big data analytics and cloud computing. It allows Upside to examine every possible airfare and hotel room, crunch the numbers and instantly package it so travelers can immediately see how to save money. The company asks the employee a few simple questions, provides options and the employee then selects the one that best suits his or her needs. Users can keep the e-gift cards or apply their value to reduce the cost of the flight or hotel. A $35 service fee that covers 24-hour customer service is added to each package booked.

Incentive-Based

Although small- and medium-size companies (Upside’s target market) may urge their employees to be conscientious when booking business travel, up until now there was never an incentive for the worker to choose the cheaper hotel several blocks from the convention center, or opt for the flight with an hour layover. Walker is now providing that incentive with this innovative self-booking tool.

“When Priceline was created, we knew that flexibility would become an extraordinary asset in the modern commercial world,” Walker told Fortune in an interview. “We also knew that to really make it work you needed enormous software power and you needed all kinds of tools that didn’t yet exist. It was really only in the last year to 18 months that it was clear that all the pieces came together and we could actually finish what we couldn’t before,” Walker says.

Walker told Skift that the $300 billion business travel market in America is “up for grabs” and that “the whole space is going to be reinvented in the next five to 10 years.” Upside’s demographic is firms that don’t currently use travel management services, a market Walker estimates accounts for half of U.S. business travel.

Walker believes business travelers making buying decisions will be delighted to discover what their flexibility is worth, and with this incentive will voluntarily choose packages that save their companies money.

“There is pretty much no business traveler who can’t afford to make a stop or stay a five-minute Uber ride away from the convention center, if that’s what they want to do. There’s never been a reason for the business traveler to be that flexible, because the company policies and other people’s money basically give them what they’re entitled to,” Walker said in the Skift interview. “On the other hand, if you were getting $1,000 to stay at a two-star hotel that was perfectly fine instead of a four-or-five star, where do you stay?”

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