Travel Planet

Revolutionising business travel bookings

Betty Seroussi founded Travel Planet with her husband, Tristan Dessain-Gelinet. An agile and rapid booking and management platform, now developed under an open-source licence for travel operators.

“People started to recognise me when I became a community manager,” laughs Betty Seroussi. A corporate journey is, above all, a human adventure before being about financial success. The businesswoman opened her first travel agency in Paris in 1995 after completing a BTS Tourism. “A nice address in the Buttes Chaumont; at a time when Internet use was rare. The first blow came in 2001, with airlines closed in the United States, followed by the subprime crisis and the Arab Spring. I then realised how dependent my business was on the international context,” recalls the entrepreneur. But the dematerialisation of plane and train tickets opened other prospects for Betty Seroussi. “I met my husband, who worked for a telephone company. He was astonished that the travel industry, worth 30 billion euros per annum, continued to function in such an archaic way. He asked me how I saw the future. I said I wanted to be the Amazon of business travel, and off we went. The first tender we won was three times the size of our company. After the initial euphoria, we had to act quickly, change premises, recruit, and encode. That’s how we created a Click & Control application.” With Betty in charge of operations and Tristan Dessain-Gelinet overseeing techno-logy, Travel Planet developed a hyper-functional online platform covering all stages of business travel, from booking to invoicing, including mission orders and expense reports. Now an interconnected marketplace with a substantial offering of planes, trains, hotels, cars, and VTCs.

Booking and managing tickets in a few clicks

Then the COVID crisis led Travel Planet to innovate again. “I had left tourism for business travel, but with the pandemic, everything closed up. We set our sights on reopening the world and made our platform available under an open-source licence. In 2022, we were invited to tender by SNCF as a solution provider for 42,000 agencies,” explains Betty Seroussi. The aim for travel operators is to make their commercial offering more visible whilst facilitating the process for travellers, with an application allowing them to book and manage all documents relating to their journey. “The company has been consistently profitable since 2014. We didn’t raise money, I didn’t want to, and I systematically reinvested the dividends in research and development, mounting up to one million euros per annum. With a turnover of 70 million in 2022, 100 million is our aim in 2023,” she adds. The company also recently bought a UK agency to develop along the lines of Travel Planet France for EDF Energie.

L’avis du jury

« Amadeus fait partie des très belles réussites de notre région dans le domaine du voyage et il y en a d’autres, comme celle de Travel Planet. Cette start-up a réussi à s’implanter dans un domaine hyperconcurrentiel, grâce à son approche disruptive fondée sur les solutions numériques. » 

Travel Planet
Localisation : Valbonne et Londres
Création : 1992
Activité : métiers des agences de voyages
Collaborateurs : 50 salariés 
(dont 80 % sur la Côte d’Azur)
Capital social : 3 000 000 €