Orbitz for Business has signed an agreement to provide an online booking tool for IBM through 2020, Orbitz announced this month.
Under the terms of the agreement, Orbitz will provide online booking support for IBM travelers in 90 countries, Orbitz Worldwide CEO Barney Harford said during the company's first-quarter earnings call. IBM will maintain its existing relationship with American Express for customer service and fulfillment, he said.
IBM long has been the largest purchaser of business travel in the United States as measured by U.S.-booked air travel.
The firm for several years had used Travelport's Traversa tool for online booking, but Orbitz also had provided account management and technology support to IBM as part of that arrangement. Orbitz and Travelport have a long shared history, with the two part of the same company until Orbitz's public spinoff in 2007, and Travelport remains its largest shareholder.
For Orbitz for Business, the IBM agreement represented an opportunity to "turbo-charge" global growth by "deploying the online booking engine on a decoupled basis from the end-to-end experience," Harford said. The company will be looking to do so for other companies or travel management companies "as it makes sense" as a supplement to its core business of providing both booking technology and customer service and fulfillment, he said.
Harford claimed Orbitz for Business fosters higher online booking adoption rates than "booking tools used by traditional TMCs."
"We are able to deliver an online booking experience to the corporate traveler that mirrors the tools they choose to use as a leisure traveler on Orbitz," Harford said. "We've been able to take all of our experience in making the site easy to use for consumers and leverage that to provide an easy-to-use solution at the corporate travel level while incorporating all the requirements around compliance and negotiated rates."