<B>TRX Tests Meeting Applet</B>
<I>Wants More Of Consolidation Market</I>
By Chris Davis
Dallas-based TRX Technology Services--the former Travel Technologies Group--on April 3 will begin beta-testing the first phase of its new Web-enabled corporate meetings consolidation application, MeetingAssist, with WorldTravel Partners' meetings and incentives division.
Beginning around May, later phases of MeetingAssist will tie together features of current TRX meeting software products Meeting Partner and Planning Partner, and transient booking application ResAssist, for a beta test with WorldTravel Meetings & Incentives and eventually other corporate travel buyers.
The public introduction of MeetingAssist (<I>Meetings Today</I>, Dec. 7, 1998), which TRX vice president of product development Luther Pawling hopes to complete in late December, will enable the company to challenge Philadelphia-based McGettigan Partners for a larger share of the corporate meetings consolidation market.
"We have an opportunity here to be the first corporate meeting application to solve the whole problem, from planning to negotiating to fulfillment to reporting," said Steve Reynolds, TRX Technology Services' general manager. "We've been building these tools for the last eight years, and they can be brought together for meetings data consolidation."
McGettigan officials were nonplussed at the news. "With our CORE Discovery EN software, we've always been able to provide that data to our major corporate accounts," said executive vice president Christine Duffy. "With (Internet spin-off company) StarCite on the front end for sourcing and keeping track of expenditures, and CORE EN on the back end, it seems to work best for deep functionality."
But, Duffy said, the fact that major technology providers like TRX are developing products for the market indicates the relevance and increasing popularity of the concept of corporate meetings consolidation, which is in itself good news for her company.
St. Louis-based Maritz Travel Co. also sports a suite of meetings management tools--including Impact and Proview for Meetings--that facilitate corporate meetings consolidation and group air booking but not online site selection. However, Maritz does have an alliance with StarCite to provide the site selection functionality.
"There's still room to play in this part of the industry," said technology consultant Jeff Rasco, president of Wimberley, Texas-based Rasco & Co. "But the challenge for any of them is to stand out from each other. Ease of use will be very important, since consolidation software can easily be too technical."
The rationale behind MeetingAssist's development is to allow corporations to consolidate all meeting expenditure data without necessarily forcing all meeting information through a centralized travel department. "Some professional corporate planners don't even want to handle those small, one-off type of meetings," Pawling said. "They want standardization throughout the whole arena, but to have every single meeting come through a centralized planning department doesn't make that much sense. The notion is not to try to centralize everything but to make a common tool available to everybody. That's the thrust of corporations. They want to consolidate the data, not necessarily by making the process happen in one place, but by making the process link to a central database."
WorldTravel Meetings & Incentives will use MeetingAssist for all current meetings consolidation clients, including pharamaceutical giants Schering-Plough Corp. of Madison, N.J., and Warner Lambert Co. of Morris Plains, N.J., and any new clients, said COO Kaye Mulkeen.
"We've been intimately involved in the development of MeetingAssist for years," Mulkeen said. "We've provided meeting experts, held forums with customers and helped them build the framework for the meetings consolidation business. So we're excited to begin the implementation."
MeetingAssist differs primarily from TRX's previous meetings technology offerings in that it will be Web-enabled, where prior applications were single-user desktop programs, and it will incorporate the ability to book at negotiated corporate group rates for both hotel and air.
"Everyone's been scrambling to develop meetings air booking applications, and having the ResAssist expertise to draw on will get this very close to full functionality," Pawling said.
MeetingAssist will be able to differentiate between a volume-based corporate deal and the airlines' zone fare offerings and automatically book the superior option, Pawling said, as well as offer the ability to restrict bookings to preferred carriers. The only thing the application currently can't do is provide passenger name records when booked as a block on a single flight--though Pawling said that may change when MeetingAssist is released in December.
Other new features of MeetingAssist include a company-wide meetings calendar designed to allow employees to schedule prudently to avoid cancellation fees and allow the group travel department to capture data.