CEO Christine Berthet Broadens B-there's Functionality

Online attendee management company B-there.com later this month will publicly introduce functionality that will allow corporate meeting planners to capture passenger name records for attendee travel booked offline and reconcile them with rooming lists and registration data.

The functionality, which also includes the ability to pass internal attendee profile data from the corporate intranet to a global distribution system and the ability to book non-employees traveling to corporate meetings online at negotiated rates, was developed last fall and is being used by less than five customers, said B-there CEO Christine Berthet. The Westport, Conn.-based company waited until now to offer the functionality to all its clients to ensure the technology and the process for offline PNR retrieval was appropriately seamless.

B-there will be able to link to the appropriate GDS and pull attendee PNRs equipped with the proper meeting-specific identifier put in when the attendee books travel through an agency, Berthet said. The system takes those PNRs, combines them with PNRs gathered through online bookings and reconciles that data against the planner's list of attendee names, allowing the planner to redress the situation should the lists not match. "We can retrieve these PNRs even though they were never in our system and reconcile them with the data of all the attendees who have registered for the event," Berthet said. "Unless you have all that PNR integration, you don't have true travel integration. If you can't do it this way, then you're not doing it. You'll have dirty data." The system can lead to cost savings, Berthet said, as more comprehensive booking data from all sources can yield better negotiations.

The solution is based on the concept that not all corporate meeting attendees are employees, and therefore don't often have the ability to access the corporate intranet to book meeting travel online, and so will often do so through an agency. "The majority of the people, about 80 percent, still don't want to use a booking engine and want to do so over the phone," Berthet said. The company's four-pronged solution enables planners to capture the actual booking data of those attendees, as well as those who do want to book online. The latter group can use B-there's event-specific booking solution, which links directly to online booking company GetThere's group booking engine. The two companies' 20-month partnership gives B-there access to GetThere's group booking engine but not its transient booking engine, which is separate. Event-specific negotiated rates can be loaded into the Sabre global distribution system for booking. Sabre owns GetThere and currently is the only GDS with which B-there has the ability to allow meeting attendees to book negotiated group fares at the point of registration.

B-there archrival SeeUthere Technologies of Santa Clara, Calif., introduced similar technology in late January (Meetings Today, Feb. 11).