Please read the following case and answer with precise response on the 4 questions below the case. thumps up for good response.

In early 2018, it was clear that TRIPBAM had consolidated its position as the leader in hotel rate shopping for travel managers. The firm had evolved from a solution offering little more than clustered rate shopping into a full-fledged hotel reservation and compliance management system. The recent partnership with Traxo extended TRIPBAM services beyond the established reservation systems, enabling the integration of information on off-channel 1 bookings. By some accounts, a sizable share of corporate travel bookings was still being managed outside the standard procedure and agreements. As Traxo chief commercial officer Cara Whitehill put it, One of the challenges corporate travel managers face when it comes to managing invisible off-channel bookings is getting that data to their relevant downstream managed travel service providers, because those service providers dont have a way to access that data if it isnt booked via the Travel Management Company. 2 Customers were on the rise too. TRIPBAM was steadily closing deals with leading travel agencies and management firms. Carlson Wagonlit Travel (CWT) entered into a partnership agreement with the firm in 2016 followed by the European management firm Business Travel Direct and by HRG in 2017. TRIPBAM was gaining momentum in the corporate space. In 2018, TRIPBAM widened its scope by signing an agreement with FairFly, a startup offering a product similar to TRIPBAM but focused on airfare savings. Despite the success and positive momentum, Steve Reynolds and his team could not fall asleep at the wheel. In June 2017, Marriott International announced a change in its cancellation policy. The chain unilaterally decided to charge the equivalent of a one-night stay for all cancellations made past 48 hours prior to check-in. Despite the unpopularity of this change among travel managers, other large chainsHilton, IHG, and Hyattpromptly followed suit. 3 With respect to competition, while online travel agencies remained limitedly concerned for TRIPBAM, travel agents had started to react to TRIPBAMs entrance. In March 2017, CWT shut down the WorldMate app and removed it from the app stores, halting operations in the consumer space. With this move, CWT was following TRIPBAMs suit by refocusing their development on travel solutions for corporate clients. The other TRIPBAM competitors, Yapta and Tingo, had maintained their relative position in the market. TripRebel was acquired by Ashton Travel and had stopped price monitoring and automatic rebooking. At the same time, new services were coming to market. Waylo 4 leveraged artificial intelligence to enable booking at a given predicted room price. At any time when the predicted rate was higher than the current one, Waylo would automatically refund the price difference, assuming the entire risk of the forecast. Service, 5 another recent startup, integrated hotel rate shopping with claim filing with airliners just by scraping customers inboxes. Hopper 6 moved beyond airfare prediction to hotels and started offering room rate monitoring. In 2018, numerous rate monitoring services were appearing in the consumer space, and examples abounded: HotelCombined.com, Pruvo.net, Rebookey.com, RoomsNinja.com, and dreamcheaper.com. Figure 9.1. Services home page (https://getservice.com) There was no doubt that TRIPBAM created value for its customerslarge firms with a strong need to monitor their travel policies. Compliance and the potential for the savings that TRIPBAM was unleashing had fueled the firms growth. But Reynolds knew full well that value creation did not directly imply value appropriation, particularly in the long term. How was TRIPBAM positioned to withstand imitation from competitors entering the market? What resources would the firm be able to leverage to erect barriers for the erosion of its competitive advantage? More important, what did the firm need to do now to foster sustainability of its advantage over time? Discussion Questions 1. Do you believe TRIPBAM brings unique value to the market? Substantiate your answer. 2. What characteristics of TRIPBAM service do you believe are the most valuable for its corporate customers? 3. If TRIPBAM continues gaining traction in the market, do you think it will be a sustainable business? Could competitors easily imitate it? 4. How could TRIPBAM protect its value proposition?