Navigated to Innovation in Business Travel: Elia Wallen's Journey at Web Summit Vancouver - Transcript

Innovation in Business Travel: Elia Wallen's Journey at Web Summit Vancouver

Episode Transcript

You are listening to the Business Leadership Podcast with Edwin.

Paul: I'm Paul Newton, creative producer of the Future Narrator miniseries, and I'm joined by Edwin Frondozo, host of the Business Leadership Podcast.

We are recording live at Web Summit Vancouver 2025, where we're exploring how today's leaders shape the future, not just through strategy, but through story.

We believe that a strong point of view is what inspires communities.

Builds movements and cuts through the noise in uncertain times.

Today's guest is reimagining Business Travel at Scale.

Elia Wallen is the founder and CEO of Engine, a hypergrowth company that has redefined how business travel is booked, managed, and experienced.

Under Elia's leadership engine has tripled its revenue, helped over 900,000 travelers and empowered more than 750,000 hotels to grow their market share, all while building one of Colorado's most admired company's cultures named CEO of the Year by Colorado Bus Magazine.

Elia has led the company through a bold transformation from hotel engine to engine, adding flights and rental cars to its platform, and securing a valuation of 2.1 billion.

With a focus on product innovation, customer obsession and culture as a competitive edge.

Elia is a, is building something far bigger than a booking tool.

He's building the future of business travel.

Welcome to the Business Edwin: Leadership Podcast.

Elia How you doing today?

I'm great.

I'm great.

Thanks for having me.

can you tell us about Engine, specifically the problem that you are trying to solve when it comes to.

Business travel.

We're all here for business travel and corporate bookings.

Elia: Yeah, for sure.

I didn't come from the space.

We started off in corporate housing and we did corporate housing for traveling, nurses and doctors outta the gate.

But our customers said, book hotels for us and book travel for us.

And at first I was.

I didn't know what they mean meant, there was so much available resources to go online and book and take care of travel.

Edwin: Yeah.

Elia: But when we started to dig in a little bit more, we realized that there's a pretty big gap between tools that were built for very large organizations.

I.

And then tools that were built for consumers, right?

Platforms that were built for consumers.

And what we found was there's a very big gap in what we call the unmanaged business travel space.

And so you have these smaller businesses generally speaking, that just don't have the same resources as those larger companies do.

And so we wanted to build a product that could help serve that population, that underserved population of small and medium sized businesses.

And that's what we set out to do and it's been great so far.

Edwin: Yeah.

No, and I was just thinking when I'm thinking even just for my, me and my small teams and some of the folks I work with and just, I'm just trying to get the clarity in terms of that gap that you're filling in is I.

I don't wanna go to my travel agent and I gotta figure out where a hotel to go to and then get my cars and who's gonna is that sort of the gap that you're filling in for me as a small business owner?

Elia: Yeah, that's right.

It's beyond booking as you mentioned, so we help facilitate that transaction, that booking transaction.

But from a business perspective, there's a lot of other things that they need, right?

Yeah.

You wanna see visibility into what's going on with your spend.

Who's on the road, maybe who needs support?

And so we provide a lot more outside of what a, a traditional kind of B2C or consumer booking platform does for businesses.

And yeah so it's beyond booking, it's trends, it's reporting, it's consolidated billing.

Oh yeah.

So we do that for businesses to make their lives easier so they can focus on building and growing their business.

And not managing travel.

And again, it's really curated for that more SMB Edwin: Yeah.

Elia: That maybe doesn't need all those heavy compliance and policy adherence tools but still needs more than what kind of a consumer platform would be built for.

Edwin: And I'd be curious as you dove in and really looked into this space, I guess the.

Addressable market sizes is fairly big as well.

Elia: It's massive.

Yeah.

From our research and what we can find about 50% of business travel is unmanaged.

So about 50% of business travel is done on consumer sites.

Yeah.

And direct and travel agencies and things like that.

And we believe that's the opportunity.

Edwin: Yeah.

That's amazing.

G, good for you.

Just to dive in, in terms of you as the business leader, I'd be curious just what your take would be when it comes to who you are, what's your unique point of view that you bring?

To solving this gap, this problem when it comes to business travel?

Elia: Yeah.

I honestly, I think the fact that we weren't, we didn't come from the traditional TMC space, gave us an edge.

There's a lot of great people and resources and companies that are, have been doing that for a long time.

And I think we've looked at it from a different angle.

We approached it with a tech first mentality and how do you solve some of these problems without these traditional maybe approaches and solutions?

And I think that's honestly given us an edge.

They say ignorance is bliss, and I think there is a, there is an opportunity there in this space to just rethink how you can do some of these things and rethink monetization.

And do you need contracts?

No, we don't need contracts.

And there's some other things we've just approached this differently and it's really worked.

Paul: And so when you started delving into the problem, you said you were like you were booking or people were approaching you like, how do we book this like.

How did you look at it?

What when you started solving this, you said looking from the outside, what did it look like to you?

Elia: Yeah at first, and I think, anybody listening right now is not, we don't need another booking tool.

Exactly.

It's covered.

We're good.

Move on.

I would find another, it's a red ocean, right?

And honestly that was probably one of the most surprising things about this.

And I would just say there, there's so much opportunity.

And so many spaces that maybe are dominated by a few people, and then you get closer to the problem, you start to see, all these other opportunities that are there.

And that's exactly what happened.

But our customers from another business that I founded were pulling us this way.

There's no way, I ever wake up and man, we need to, we just need to build a booking tool.

Yeah.

Like that just doesn't make sense.

But those customers were persistent and honestly, for the first couple years I'm like.

We're not doing it.

Like we gotta stay focused on our other core product and core offering.

And but they were persistent and it pulled us there and then we got closer and go, oh wow.

You've got Fortune 5,000 tools and you've got.

Consumer based products, you don't really have anything in the middle there as an eye-opening experience for sure.

Yeah.

Paul: And so as as I shared the problem they're experiencing and their dissatisfaction with the tools that they were using, like how did you break it down to, oh, then we can, we can do this and then add this and make it.

Make them happy.

Elia: That's exactly what we did.

We actually started with a manual team.

It was called THH, traveler Save in Hotels.

And we had we went to Home Depot and got those fold out desks, and we were running outta space.

The other company was growing fast, and we were literally just booking things like maybe a traditional travel agent see would've done.

We're calling hotels and getting pricing and booking and billing and doing, managing all that.

In a very scrappy, very small way.

Yeah.

But I think the idea was just like, Hey, this doesn't scale.

But there's clearly demand.

It's working on a, in a insanely manual way.

Let's start to apply some technology to this, and that's what we did.

Paul: Yeah.

Okay.

And then and so then how did you bring the customers along on the journey?

Elia: Yeah.

I'll say we almost made a massive mistake, right?

We built this tool.

We thought that we had this thing that was gonna be great, and we built it and.

No one showed up.

Yeah.

You guys know the saying, right?

If you build it, they will come.

It's, if you build it and market it, they will come.

And so we had we had a product that we thought worked, our internal team was using it.

But no one was there.

And honestly, I almost shut down the company altogether.

It was very small, just a few people.

'Cause it wasn't really taking off in the way that, you know, and again, naive right?

Looking back, like of course how would people have known about it.

But we took a couple of sellers from the other business and said, Hey.

Try this out and we approach a similar go to market strategy and and it started working.

Yeah.

Paul: And how did how did people react?

'Cause people are just dissatisfied.

They know this kind of is clunky and it sucks and then all of a sudden problems start going away.

How did you experience that?

Elia: Yeah, it was the honestly, the billing was the biggest hook for us when we launched the ability for people to have a consolidated bill.

One of the problems when you're a business booking without a tool, without one of those bigger tools is.

You are literally giving a front desk a credit card number.

And on physical plastic, right?

This is years and years ago.

And if something happens with that credit card, all your reservations have to be called and you have to go update everything, whether it's shut off or stolen or fraud or whatever.

And so we were just taking that burden off of them.

So even though the product wasn't perfect and it was still clunky and maybe didn't have all the features in the world.

There's a few things that we had to do that was just eye-opening.

And so even though, again, maybe it was clunky, it was still better than the alternative of them manually doing this themselves.

Paul: Okay.

And then just as you were looking at the problem, do you see any, like patterns in how you approach problems or the way that you see things that has, allowed you to build this?

Elia: Yeah, it's always with the customer mind.

Yeah.

It's just what problem are we trying to solve?

And we really never.

Added any friction that we didn't need to.

I think a lot of times people are like how are we gonna monetize?

Let's do this.

Let's add this.

We're gonna charge a fee.

If we started charging a fee outta the gate, we would never get anywhere.

And so I think we just how do you get the customer to say yes?

How do you get 'em to say yes more often?

How do you ask the sales team?

What are they saying no to?

Go solve that, go fix that, and you just continue to move down the line.

And all those friction points you just literally obsess about and you remove.

And we do that with almost everything.

Honestly our board jokes around just give it away for free again, Elia just give it away for free.

I'm like, but yeah.

Honestly, let's create as much value as possible and and will be successful and the money will come.

It figures out a way.

It's funny how that happens.

You create a lot of value for people.

Yeah.

You'll figure out a way to monetize.

But when you stick those those constraints up front, those friction points up front, like you never really know maybe what you fully have.

Paul: Yeah.

Like a little earlier when we were chatting, you were saying like, when you're in the company and just working, you're like the opposite of like really laid back.

You're like, focused and on.

Tell me how how you are and how that just gets the team really behind you on this.

Yeah, man.

Elia: We're in it.

So my first company was bootstrapped until the day I sold it.

We never raised a dollar and.

I think that scrappiness and that just we burn the boats, right?

This is all we have.

We don't have a line life of money coming in.

And you have to make it work.

And so we were scrappy.

We never had all the resources and I think we, we really tried to pull that DNA forward.

So when I talk about the culture internally, Edwin: yeah, Elia: it's we grind like we're just a hardworking group that like holds each other accountable and.

It's not a place to rest invest.

It is just, it's something that we we really take pride in to be honest of how we how efficient, how productive the talent density inside the business is very high.

And so these are all things that we just hold near and dear and it's part of why we're successful.

Paul: And clearly that culture is important to you.

Like, how do you make sure that it stays the way that you want it?

Oh, man.

Elia: I probably do three to five interviews a day.

We have what we do bar raiser.

So we took a page outta Amazon's book and we applied bar raiser concept to all of our hires.

And we ensure that kind of our culture carriers and those folks that, that are, that kind of DNA that we look for are in nearly all of these interviews and the hiring processes.

And it's, you start there right at the front door and you make sure the right people get in.

And then you have to live those values.

And so as new people come in you can learn things from them.

And we're also going to maybe have to reeducate and retrain and indoctrinate and how we wanna operate and how we go.

And the right people say, hell yeah, a lot of competitive people out there and, that's who we looked for.

And that's how we do it.

Paul: Oh, clearly those things don't happen by accident.

It speaks volumes to who you're, and how you're leading.

And and it's inspiring to see what you've done.

Elia: Thanks.

Thanks.

Edwin: Yeah.

You know what came to mind Elia as you, as we were talking in conversation and really sharing sort of your, and I'm.

I, I don't know if your previous company that you sold as Bootstrap, was that your first company?

No.

Yeah, a lot of little Elia: guys before that, but yeah.

Yeah, for Edwin: sure.

So what I was really feeling and really inspired by is that how Bootstrap and I understand, I started a.

Tech company, I was bootstrap and I know just being Tena, very tenacious and just keep going and pushing and there's no excuse you gotta do it.

We just gotta get things done.

And I like how you mentioned that you just moved it forward.

It's really an inspiration to keep that.

And now that you have an abundance of recess resources, like how do you I think it's a, it may be a challenge, but and Paul.

Alluded to it, but it's like sometimes now you're in abundance.

If someone needs something, you give it to them.

And given the abundance and where we are in ai, I am curious how how are you changing the way you're leading your teams with AI and both internally and maybe forward with your clients as well and how that's showing up now.

Elia: Yeah.

So I'll hit on the first part on, yeah.

On abundance and man, I'll say after our series B.

We had some cash in it is our big raise, right?

Yeah.

The, more cash at the bank than I'd ever seen.

Yeah.

On the line.

I do.

I'm like, what's going on?

And honestly, man, you can see how money can ruin a business.

We just said we made it, we got it.

We figured this out.

Go.

We made it.

Let's go.

Everybody do 10 x more.

And that was a real lesson.

And, luckily, the core of the business and the core DNA was still there, but we made a lot of mistakes.

We were not ready for scale and money forces you almost to, to you, you make a lot of bad decisions.

And so we pulled that back.

We learned from those mistakes.

Luckily, soon enough.

How long?

It was a solid six months of running.

That's the honeymoon of it.

Hard.

Yeah.

Like thinking like somebody wins a lotto.

Edwin: Yeah.

What Elia: are you gonna go do?

Like you buy a plane in a boat and five houses and all this stuff, and then you wake up one day and you're broke and Edwin: Yeah.

Elia: Luckily we had enough self-control and the Edwin: people around you too, I'm sure.

Yeah, Elia: absolutely right.

And but that was a wake up call.

And so money does a lot of things good and bad, and people just have to be aware of both those things.

And so on the abundance side, like we, we're still, we're growing very fast.

We have more money in the bank now than we had then.

And but there's just a lot more discipline to it.

And we know, we're not gonna get drunk on this.

Oh my gosh, we just happened, right?

We have pulled back there.

We spend money, we spend more than we used to.

But I used to like.

Geez.

Like guys, we like, I wouldn't pay for a thing.

Yeah.

Like literally like Paper Ivy, you make sure people are using both sides of the paper because, like that type of thing.

So I love that.

Now we might just use one side of the paper, but we're also not using paper.

That's good.

Yeah.

So we've evolved a lot there, but we still really try to keep it pretty humble and keep it reasonable and rational on the AI front.

Goodness.

We could talk about this all day.

We, yeah.

We're doing a lot of it.

We're probably not the furthest along of some of the, those early, early, early adopters and movers.

But I think for a company, our scale and our size, I think that we're doing pretty well.

I do a lot of interviews and I ask, and those Hey, what are y'all doing?

And honestly, I You'd be surprised how many aren't doing much.

Yeah.

It's really surprising that, yeah.

Yeah.

In, in that measurement we're way ahead and certainly in other cases we're probably behind.

But it's here and it's not gonna, it's only gonna get better.

And it is the worst it's ever gonna be is today.

And it's, it just continues to evolve and so much opportunity for the customer, for our great suppliers and partners that we have too.

Productivity efficiency and just mindless things that people don't have to do anymore.

It's, it's a revolution.

It's amazing.

Edwin: Yeah.

I'd just to say, given your ethos and the ethos of the culture that you're bringing up, it sounds to me that your customers will probably tell you when they need it.

That's right.

I want That's right.

And I think, I have trust and faith that you're probably like, Hey.

I think when we got asked this 10 times in the last month That's right.

What does this mean?

And let's dive in.

So that's really fun, I think, and that's the opportunity because now you're scaling with a specific and the clients are coming now, right?

Elia: Yeah.

We have not seen, and it's early, but we have not seen a ton on the customer side to be honest.

Yeah.

And I think it's just that change and just, some people are gonna stick to the old ways of doing it and that's fine.

We're gonna support that.

And there's gonna be some that are.

A bit more ahead.

But I think when you start to sprinkle it in and they don't realize what we could do and what we could help them with, I think that's where the kind of the magic happens.

That surprise and delight moment with AI throughout.

Yeah, exactly.

But internally, we ask every department all the time, what's your biggest constraint?

Yeah.

That's if 99% of things are going right, I wanna talk about the 1% that's not Yeah.

And we go after the 1%.

You find those choke points and those constraints and a lot of times the answer can be or will be.

Ai, and it's either go, here's a new tool and you don't have to worry about that anymore, or this.

So we're still hiring humans very fast.

But there's also just getting more productivity of everyone.

Edwin: Yeah, it's exciting.

It's exciting times.

I'm excited for you.

I'm excited for Engine.

I'd love it if you could share your final thoughts, recommendations to the business leaders who are listening today.

I, it I kind of wanna frame it in context that, especially to those who are scaling right now what would you tell them right now?

Scaling fast.

Elia: Scaling fast.

So I just wrote a post on LinkedIn.

I think now is an incredible time to hire talented people.

You can do more with less.

And then I also say you could do even more with more.

And so I love that.

There's an interesting angle I think of a dilemma of, Hey, do you really need all those people?

But if you have the resources and the tam, yes.

If you can get 80, 80% increase in productivity from folks, like step on the gas, that's what we're doing.

That's how we're thinking about it.

If you raise your first check don't operate any different.

Like literally, there's very few things you should do different.

Just preserve those dollars, make sure that you're spending things on the right things.

And yeah, obviously AI is just there and I think earlier companies have that natural benefit I think of being able to just build in kind of an AI first way with a lot of their applications.

But, yeah.

Edwin: No, that's amazing.

It s very inspiring.

Elia we we want to present you, this is a book we just released.

It's called Future Narrator.

Oh, thanks.

Appreciate it.

It's really inspiring what you're doing.

We believe you're helping build the right future, especially in this customer-centric point of view.

And I love that you're focus on the human first, especially on your team building.

thank you for being on the Business Leadership Podcast.

Thank you.

Appreciate it.

You are listening to the Business Leadership Podcast with Edwin.