American Express Business Travel's CITS joint venture in China this month will implement the services of BTS Asia, a year-old firm offering arrangements and negotiated rates for airport processing (meet and greet/Customs clearance), ground transport, airport transfers, and translators and guides in more than a dozen Chinese cities.
Beginning 20 July with BTS Asia's new online platform, CITS will use all the services except translators and guides, according to BTS Asia executives. With a former Amex executive as CEO and about 25 part- or full-time employees, BTS Asia during its first year has evolved its target market to address more heavily managed corporate accounts, and now is putting the finishing touches on its Sericana tech platform, allowing travel management companies to resell to their clients BTS Asia's booking services.
Other BTS Asia customers include travel management company ET China as well as Gray Company, Tomcar and The Soap and Detergent Association. Partners include limos.com, Towncar International and Chinese trade show company Global Sources. The company also offers support for VIPs, meetings and events, entertainment, food, tours, visas and passports, and consolidator rates on airlines.
According to its executives, BTS Asia offers essentially everything a foreign or domestic traveler needs to travel in the huge, strategically important yet enigmatic country. The company has minimized an earlier focus on the air and lodging services typically acquired through a global distribution system. "Air and hotel was part of the offering," said BTS Asia CEO Stephen Power. "We still have some consolidator programs, but it's not really the customer segment we're after and not something [we] actively promote. But ground services tend not to be arranged by TMCs internationally. They tend not to get any revenue [from] them. What typically is happening is that a travel arranger, a host company or a hotel is arranging these services. The service quality is all over the board."
BTS Asia provides commissions to its distribution partners, and the company makes money through a markup on the prices it negotiates with vendor partners in each city. Officials estimate that a Westerner's typical trip to China lasts seven to 10 days, and 14 percent of the average $8,000 spend is for ground services.
Targeting TMCs
"People try to squeeze more and more from hotel and air, but they can make more from four airport transfers than off one air ticket," added BTS Asia chairman and co-founder Jay Riskind. "The challenge is finding an access point in the market. There are too many in the China marketplace, so it required some discipline for us on getting a foothold. Unmanaged? Midmarket? MICE? Trade shows/events? One strategy was to work with corporations directly, but we realized it wasn't a big enough priority for decision-makers in the United States. They perceived it to be a niche offering and largely deferred the decision-making to their offices in China.
"There were lots of question marks as to where we were going to find our fit, and the global economy complicated matters further," Riskind added. "It turned out that our best access point is through TMCs."
Riskind expects to sign deals with all of the top four global TMCs. "We anticipate having the majority of the top 10 in China by year-end, if not the beginning of the fourth quarter."
Supplementing its Chicago-area call center, the company's ordering technology creates an itinerary that at the moment is not integrated with the typical agency or GDS-based trip record, but Riskind said such integration is on the way. "The first rollout is a side-by-side tool with a separate itinerary and invoice that has separate reporting," said Riskind.
Privately held BTS Asia is a U.S.-based company that is applying to become a Wholly Owned Foreign Enterprise in China.