Cornerstone
Information Systems and TripIt are working with a few travel management
companies to test a service that helps corporate clients update travelers about
itinerary and gate change information through mobile devices and track
travelers' whereabouts.
Cornerstone began working to integrate information from its mid-office ICQX
reservation management and fulfillment platform with TripIt's application
programming interface in April and started testing the integration with San
Jose, Calif.-based Casto Travel, Los Angeles-based TravelStore and Tulsa-based
World Travel Service in June.
"We have been anxious for years to find a tool that fully integrates not
only itinerary delivery information, but flight monitoring as well through
mobile devices," said World Travel Service president Alex Eaton. "The
Cornerstone-TripIt process facilitates getting accurate and updated information
to our travelers in real-time."
He explained that without Cornerstone's involvement, the TripIt tool requires
travelers booking through a TMC to receive their itinerary and then send the
itinerary to TripIt. Through integration, the itinerary "automatically
synchronizes down to their calendar, so it is on their phone and on Outlook,
and then the TripIt product monitors the trip from start to finish so that if
there any interruptions, delays and in particular gate changes, that
information is pushed to the individual traveler directly in real-time,"
Eaton said.
Like most of Cornerstone's hundreds of TMC customers, World Travel targets
midmarket companies, which generally have only a few people focused on managing
travel.
"One of the great things TripIt brings to this for our clients,"
Eaton said, "is that they can deploy the product enterprise-wide and when
people are traveling, we can provide that data by pushing a travel report to
them. If a traveler has done a booking outside of the corporate process, and
they pushed that information to TripIt, it provides a way for the travel
manager to have some visibility into where people are and what they are doing.
It's a great process management tool. If there is an emergency and they need to
get a hold of people or understand how many people are on the road, rather than
going to our system and downloading a report, they can pull up a visual map of
where people are around the globe instantly."
Like the other TMCs trying out the Cornerstone-TripIt integration, Eaton said
he has been testing it with clients for a little more than a month. "We're
deploying the TripIt app to several clients right now that are going through an
enterprise-wide deployment and we're in the process of making sure that the
seamless interface works the way it's supposed to," he said. "I don't
expect that test process to last too much longer."
Cornerstone is not charging its clients for this service, viewing it as an
added value to their product offering, and the same goes for the TMCs that are
offering it.
"We're not charging our clients for this," Eaton said. "There is
a TripIt Pro product that we can provide to our clients at a discount, and
we're doing that as well, but for the base product and the enterprise-wide
implementation, no. For service upgrades and a higher level of trip monitoring,
the TripIt Pro product provides that. Most of our clients, the ones that we
already have worked on this with are more than happy to pay to have that
extended service for a certain number of travelers because it provides a number
of benefits for their top and high-end and high volume travelers." At
about $30 per person per year, he said, his clients view that as an expense
worth incurring.