Rearden Unveils Travelport Partnership With More Up Its Sleeve
Today's announcement by Rearden Commerce of a strategic marketing partnership with distribution and technology firm Travelport is the first of many product advancements and partnerships, acquisitions and distribution agreements to come this year, Rearden CEO Patrick Grady told Business Travel News.
The technology provider also is working with corporate travel buyers and other partners to develop mobile capabilities, with more to come out in the second half of the year.
"We look at mobile as not only a strategic plank for Rearden, but an obvious and logical extension of the Personal Assistant," Grady said. "It's not about features and functionality or reacting to an RFP from a travel manager; it's about the user experience. If you nail that, you have the wherewithal to deliver more applications and functionality to that customer in the future."
Internationally, Rearden launched in Canada with Siemens as a corporate client, and will be announcing a travel management company partnership in that country soon as well, said Tony D'Astolfo, vice president of worldwide sales.
"We are open for business in Canada and have placed our first employees in the U.K.," D'Astolfo explained. "We're assessing where our customers want to take us. Our next endeavor will be to expand globally. We'll also leverage our partnerships to do that."
Among these partners is American Express, which took on a 10 percent equity stake in Rearden when it entered into a distribution relationship that, under the Axiom label, so far has yielded 3,000 clients—1,000 a year for the past three years, Grady said. This accounts for nearly half of Rearden's 6,500 corporate clients. The agreement with Travelport, which was reached after talks began one year ago, does not include such an equity stake, D'Astolfo added.
"I think they did go out and seek validation from some of their partners that are already using us, and then came back to say ‘yeah, this is the real deal,'" D'Astolfo said. "I encouraged them to go to other travel management companies and see if it's helping them grow their business and retain clients."