5Q With Rearden Commerce's Tony D'Astolfo

Rearden Commercehas long hung its hat on bringing managed travel controls to services that are related to the travel experience but not traditionally offered by competing intermediaries or suppliers. Rearden books travel, links to expense reporting solutions and facilitates remote conferencing, but it also enables bookings for airport parking, car service, dining, event tickets, package shipping and--the latest--international mobile phone services. Rearden in December said it added dining to its mobile solution, providing restaurant information and reservations based on the employee's location, travel itinerary, personal dining preferences and company policies. Like its desktop cousin, the mobile dining program earns clients rebates of up to 15 percent, Rearden said, as part of a Rewards Network program. Meals and entertainment account for about 14 percent of T&E budgets, according to Procurement.travel's recent "State Of The Practice" research. Excerpts of Management.travel's November conversation with Rearden Commerce vice president of worldwide sales Tony D'Astolfo follow.

Mobile has been the next thing for many years. What do you think has been holding back this "killer app" for travel as so many managed travel services don't seem to have an option for mobile?

There are a couple ways you can go with it. We developed an application that gets downloaded to the device. A lot of the first-generation mobile was done by continually going out to the Web and having to wait for pages to load. They also approached it differently, and there are a lot of things that don't work very well. We originally went out and said we would give you info to help you manage trips, and then grow it from there. This is the first iteration we have of the capability to book something online, but in coming releases we will continue to enhance this. We will do things like rebook the travel when the trip is canceled or delayed, in concert with the travel policy and what you want the end user to do. There was also a lack of functionality on the devices themselves. With the BlackBerry and the iPhone, they do a lot with the limited footprint they can work with. We have been able to do some pretty slick stuff off those backbones. We do think of it as a killer application. They live in their mobile app, and a lot of those things come together and you say, the time is right. Sometimes in travel we're ahead of the curve, and you're looking at this clunky thing to try to rebook and it takes five minutes for the Web page to load. I think GetThere outsourced the whole thing, so they outsourced to Usablenet, as a lot of people do. We built this from the ground up and made sure it was significantly integrated to the rest of the platform. We could have slapped a couple bucks out there to a third-party provider and let them go and do what they're doing with everyone else, which is kind of a punch out to a mobile app run by someone else and all they're doing is presenting page views of someone else's Web site whether they look good or not. I think GetThere is now sunsetting the Usablenet and will go build its own. [A GetThere executive this week said the company is considering its options and suggested the industry is still assessing mobile's role].

What are the travel policy parameters in the mobile restaurant program?

There are the preferreds, so you can limit people to only seeing the restaurants that are preferred--in other words, those that participate in the Rewards Network program. There's also the dollar amount. You could limit someone from reserving at [restaurants indicated in the tool as more expensive with] a "four-dollar sign" if you are limited to a one- or two-dollar sign. That's based on the restaurant ratings services and what they project average meal price to be.

This isn't meant to be an extremely enforceable thing, so it's more about guidance and visibility?

It's more the visual guilt concept, which we see being impactful. When people know what's available or around them, they can gravitate and do the right thing. So if I'm in a city I've never been to, or I'm in a different part of town, why not take a recommendation from a trusted source that's giving me a lot of information? What we try to drive people to is awareness. Policy is one part, but in reality there are a lot of restaurant opportunities. At the point of booking or when you're walking down the street, the more information you give people, the better decisions they'll make.

Looking at such other categories as airport parking, events or dining, you get into that challenge of finding the database of content. Are there any new additions along those lines?

Yes, in Europe we're talking to a company called toptable, which is like OpenTable. As you expand, you need to broaden and determine who has content, whether Zagat, the Michelin Guide in Europe or WCities as another potential content source. Citysearch has stuff. We're always on the lookout for more information. Today we've gone with the leaders in their space, OpenTable for the reservations option and Rewards Network for the rebate program, and we supplement that with a bunch of other stuff. We can add and delete and de-dupe so you don't see 14 instances of the same restaurant because they're coming from multiple databases. For airport parking, we think we're okay today. We're with Park n Fly and Purple Parking in the United Kingdom.

And how do you access event tickets?

We're in the process of supplementing our data sources. We use Global Sports Access in secondary markets only. They're the macro guy, but you wouldn't hear of GSA; it powers a lot of the content in a lot of other sites, whether it be RazorGator or StubHub. They don't have that brand name. But we're talking with a number of other content providers both primary and secondary to supplement. Particularly in the secondary market, everyone has the same stuff, so you need to do a lot of de-duping and present it right so you don't have 14 versions of Row 6 Section H at Yankee Stadium. We're looking at primary, and you can imagine the Ticketmasters of the world kind of own the primary, although there are some challenges to that. But they're open to talking. And then the third source is potentially, because clients have asked us for this, a widget to manage their own inventory. So, for example, maybe they're not going to get it, but Citi Field, I'm assuming, would have a good allotment of tickets that Citibank could use. To the degree that they want to manage their internal allotment of tickets, it might be a kind of preferred ticket database that you own; you might want to manage the [tickets] or get rid of them. But today, all of the content we're getting in events comes from Global Sports Access.