GetThere Partners With WorldTravel, Releases Survey

WorldTravel BTI is the last mega travel agency to announce a "preferred" partnership with Sabre's Menlo Park, Calif.-based GetThere corporate self-booking subsidiary. According to an announcement issued today by both companies, the new agreement formalizes years of cooperation between GetThere and WorldTravel.

A WorldTravel spokesperson said preferred status has three major components: preferential pricing, support staff who are better trained on GetThere than many other tools and improved access by those staffers to GetThere's technology and sales personnel. "This allows us to integrate a variety of technology, such as profile synchronization and user ID authentication," said Dee Runyan, executive vice president for WorldTravel BTI, noting that WorldTravel clients use six different booking engines. "GetThere now has dedicated resources on their side for us, and we dedicated some resources as well."

GetThere's booking tools already were supported by all the megas, but WorldTravel had resisted formal intimacy with self-booking tools. WorldTravel is owned by the same company as TRX Inc., whose ResAssist product competes with GetThere. ResAssist, WorldTravel's other preferred system, recently picked up one if its largest clients in Boston-based Fidelity Investments after Fidelity switched agencies to WorldTravel from American Express. Fidelity was an early client of E-Travel, now owned by Amadeus.

Meanwhile, GetThere today announced that online booking is saving 88 percent of its clients 15 percent off average airfares and for 89 percent of them 42 percent off agency fees. Also according to GetThere's Corporate Benchmark survey--conducted among about 30 of its top 100 customers with an average 2001 global air budget of $55 million--52 percent of companies either are using or considering a full or partial mandate of online booking, and three-quarters have differential transaction pricing for online versus traditional bookings.