Melded Booking Tools Roll Out

Rival global distribution system owners Sabre and Cendant are starting to roll out new integrated platforms that have the look and feel of their online travel agency offerings, Travelocity and Orbitz, more than one year after they announced they would change the interfaces of their corporate booking tools, GetThere and Travelport. Industry executives said the changes would increase the number of online hotel and car rental bookings.

GetThere already has unveiled pieces of the integrated functionality, while Travelport began testing their new platform with five corporate customers in December 2005.

GetThere is now rolling out to Sabre clients an enhanced air booking interface that boasts a new display matrix and expanded search capabilities that include alternate airports, connecting cities and shopping by reference point. The feature will be rolled out to Apollo and Worldspan customers next quarter. Also during that time, GetThere plans to release two homepages that mirror Travelocity and the traditional GetThere design, with customizable color options.

Cendant plans to reveal more enhancements at the annual National Business Travel Association convention in Chicago, July 16-19. Meanwhile, Expedia Corporate Travel made some enhancements in January and plans to unveil more soon.

Despite these improvements, the quest for a corporate tool with a leisure look and feel may be akin to searching for the holy grail, said Tom Wilkinson, senior vice president of Princeton, N.J.-based Partnership Travel Consulting. "It hasn't surprised me that these integrations have taken longer to come to fruition than thought," he said. "The devil is in the details. The problem is that the fundamental backbones of leisure tools are different than corporate tools. The difference in the logic has made it pretty challenging." Even so, not one of these tools is at a competitive disadvantage, Wilkinson said, adding that all are "pretty darn good" given the challenges of integrating one tool driven by policy with another driven by price.

GetThere said the enhanced design will help increase adoption among users. "One question we asked in 2005 was around the enhanced design, and 71 percent of our customers who responded said they believe online adoption will increase with a leisure look and feel," said Beverly Heinritz, general manager of GetThere. "Corporate booking tools up to this point have been around corporate compliance. This is really going to be about travelers wanting to use the application as well."

John Smith, president of Tower Travel, said the travel management company has more than 100 corporations using the tool, and many are seeing an improvement in attachment rates since they began using the new GetThere platform. He cited one client that increased the percentage of hotel and car rental bookings made along with air bookings by 14 percent for hotel bookings and 12 percent for car rental bookings.

"The latest enhancements are far and away the best," Smith said. "They really have helped bridge the gap between the corporate booking tools and their consumer-oriented counterparts. The look and feel of the tool has improved dramatically, and so users are reporting much higher levels of satisfaction and we're seeing those results improve on the adoption side as well."

GetThere revealed its enhanced design initiative one year ago, beginning with hotel content upgrades that provided more photographs and consumer-friendly property information. An enhanced car rental interface followed last July with a new grid display, clearer out-of-policy sections and more sorting choices.

Tower Travel Management has been working with GetThere for nine years, and Lisa Petruzzi, director of online customer contact at the Oakbrook Terrace, Ill.-based company, said the TMC experienced an 80 percent reduction in support calls once GetThere rolled out its enhanced hotel interface design. Reviews have been mixed on the air component redesign, Petruzzi said, though she attributed that to the concept's "newness." "Everybody wanted it, now they're not sure how to approach it with their own groups of travelers," she said.

GetThere's next step is providing leisure information on business trip destinations, such as making dinner reservations through the tool.

Travelport, one of three booking tools under the Cendant Corp. umbrella, is making similar preparations. Dean Sivley, COO of Travelport, said the company is in talks with a restaurant association to integrate such content as company-specific restaurant promotions and dining club rewards into the booking tool. "One of the things with corporate tools that everybody stayed away from is advertising, so some people may find the offering of restaurants and whatnot as an infringement whereas others find value, so it's got to be an opt-in, but we're definitely headed down that line," he said.

Sivley said the previous Travelport, now known as Travelport Classic, will be phased out by 2007 and only Travelport and the less-policy-driven Orbitz for Business will remain.

Travelport currently offers discounted hotel rates with various hotel chains previously only offered by Orbitz for Business, as well as the Board Room Rates program that identifies hotels with preferred amenities at a pre-negotiated rate and the Care Alert program, which automatically rebooks canceled flights and notifies travelers of delays in addition to notifying employers and family to itinerary changes. Content enhancements allow travelers to book air, hotel and car rentals all at once and lock down preferred flights during searches. Travelport also established a partnership with Verified Identity Pass Inc. for travelers to participate in private airport Registered Traveler programs.

Michael MacNair, president and CEO of the Washington, D.C.-based MacNair Travel Management, said his clients are excited for the change. "They said, 'It works fine, but there are products out there that look a little cuter,' " he noted. "From an attractiveness standpoint, it was an excitement and a sigh of relief. My sense is that we have had increased hotel and car bookings because of it."

Jamie Landsman, manager of travel systems at Deloitte & Touche's purchasing and procurement headquarters in Wilton, Conn., and a Travelport Classic customer for the past five years, is now trying to determine which for her company would be the better fit between Cendant's two offerings. "They have provided us with some information—it has been a little slower than we would have liked, but given the scope of the integration it's understandable," Landsman said. She is looking for increased adoption, unused ticket management, integrated customer care and a better user interface to leverage Deloitte's brand. "The new product would provide travelers with a comfortable leisure experience, and training on the product would be minimal," she said.

Partnership Travel Consulting's Wilkinson advised travel managers choosing a tool to focus on their functionality and power, not necessarily ease of use.

"You have the choice of a tool that has been designed from the ground up to be easy to use or something that's been designed for power," he said. "The question is which vendor provides the best balance and what the travel manager feels comfortable with. The tools aren't that difficult to learn, so the focus should be on power and support for policy and purchasing initiatives."