Short's Buys Groople, Eyes Mtgs.

Short's Travel Management in April plans to launch a new product that enables corporations to book hotel meeting space and amenities, after integrating its proprietary technology with that of online group hotel booking technology provider Groople, which it acquired last month.

The new product also will allow booking of food and beverage and audiovisual services. It will use a new application programming interface to directly connect with properties and chains that support the technology, said Short's president and CEO David LeCompte. The tool will launch with one Short's corporate account that spends more than $20 million on meetings per year. A broader product rollout for non-Short's clients is scheduled for 60 days later.

One major hotel chain already has signed on to share its inventory content using the new API, according to LeCompte. It enables administrators to book up to 50 hotel rooms and automatically process a reservation and pricing request instead of waiting for individual properties to respond to requests for proposals.

Groople's previous booking platform, which launched in 2004, was designed for booking multiple hotel rooms primarily for incentive travel, small groups and sports travel, LeCompte said.

The acquisition price was undisclosed. According to LeCompte, the two companies began discussing possibilities for an acquisition in March 2008, but Groople's venture capital owners, who invested $20 million into the company, were asking too high a price and the difficulties in combining technologies for a joint venture were too great.

The acquisition was completed in December, but the technology teams had worked on the new product since the acquisition was agreed to "in late October, early November when their dynamic changed where someone was looking to acquire them and that fell through and we stepped in."