Expedia Corporate Travel last month formed a relationship with online meetings management technology firm SeeUthere Technologies, offering ECT clients attendee management and data consolidation technology tools and confirming widespread industry speculation that the company was poised to make its initial move into the corporate meetings market.
Under the terms of the deal, Bellevue, Wash.-based Expedia will offer its corporate travel customers Santa Clara, Calif.-based SeeUthere's MeetingView tools on its Web site. Expedia Corporate Travel itself also will use those tools to fulfill clients' meeting services requests.
Expedia will not make an equity investment in SeeUthere as part of the deal, officials said.
Expedia officials had promised the company would envelop meetings technology into its offerings, pointing to its 2002 acquisition of bricks-and-mortar agency Metropolitan Travel as the model
(Meetings Today, Nov. 10). Though Expedia did not purchase SeeUthere as it did Metropolitan, officials said the company's philosophy of offering technology and agent-assisted service drove both relationships.
"The Metropolitan Travel deal was about putting full service and technology together," said Mitch Robinson, Expedia Corporate Travel marketing manager. "We have the service, so this deal now is to get the technology. We have agents with 10 to 12 years of experience and a lot of expertise in this field."
One consideration of the deal, Robinson said, was SeeUthere's ability to be used by agents to plan and book client meetings or by the clients themselves to handle their own events.
SeeUthere already is aligned with Cendant Corp.'s Travelport, among other online transient self-booking options, and long has positioned itself as a solution that can align with any other tool.
"We don't distinguish online agencies from traditional corporate travel agencies," said SeeUthere CEO John Chang. He noted the various SeeUthere partners thus far cater to different sectors of the marketplace, with ECT so far attracting primarily midmarket and smaller companies. "The market is very large, and we have penetration into different market segments," Chang said. "We're a complementary fit. We have some partners who have a very focused Fortune 500 approach, and they have good exposure into smaller companies."
The deal is not exclusive from SeeUthere's perspective. "It does not restrict us from working with an online partner," said SeeUthere COO Stanley Chin, "but it is a relationship, and we will work together."
Robinson would not discuss exclusivity terms from Expedia's perspective.
Expedia's highest-profile customer to date, Akamai Technologies of Cambridge, Mass., is not a current SeeUthere client, but manager of travel and meeting services Terry Sullo said she planned to examine the meeting technology firm's capability to match attendee management with air management. "I'm definitely looking forward to the air integration piece and thoroughly evaluating the partnership," Sullo said. "I want to see how the process will work and how the air will be integrated. I'm pleased. I've waited a long time."
Another Expedia Corporate Travel client, Globe Machine Manufacturing Co. of Tacoma, Wash., currently has an active, though decentralized, meetings program that isn't likely to change because of the SeeUthere deal, said travel coordinator Laura Shane. "Everything is pretty well overseen," she said. "Before we decide to hold any type of meeting, be it engineering, service or sales, we talk it through and decide on our options. All the travel arrangements then are left to me to coordinate. It's not something we're looking to structure more."
The move illustrates the growing partnerships between meetings management companies, online and offline, and online agencies. ECT competitor Orbitz for Business this past summer allied with Chicago-based David Green Interactive, a division of meetings and convention management firm David Green Organization
(Meetings Today, July 7).