Beverly Heinritz
Management.travelrecently caught up with Beverly Heinritz, vice president and general manager for Sabre's GetThere, to discuss the corporate self-booking tool provider's involvement with government and university travel.
Can you provide an update on GetThere's involvement with government travel?
Starting with the federal government, we have a partnership with Carlson, as a result of the e-travel initiative, which started with Al Gore and still is rolling out. The reason why that is complicated is that it is a pure end-to-end solution, starting with the request all the way through fulfillment. The Carlson Government team is the integrator. Our investment was the Direct Government product: being able to book government rates, designate contract carriers, designate the Fly America Act carriers, etc. But basically, it is [like] a corporate program and that is why it was a good space for us to go invest in. The more complicated part was the integration tools, and being able to shift data off to different financial systems [used by each government agency]. It is rolled out and we have successfully done end-to-end transactions. From a business perspective, we are at 100 percent year-over growth in the government space and continuing to roll out. We have not had a lot of state governments yet. I would anticipate that would be done more through distributors.
What is unique about university travel?
When you think about universities, what is alike is that they use state government fares--similar to federal government fares--and inside they like to be treated like different businesses. The college of business does something different than the college of sociology, and so on. So [GetThere's] supersite/subsite capability--being able to set up different subsites for each different college, if you will, with their own policies--is a pretty good deal. Some universities have made the decision that [self booking] is now part of their culture, and others have some educators who do not want to go online and are high-touch.
To win these bids, paid for by taxpayer dollars, we imagine that the fees would have to be very competitive. How do you balance what might be too low of a fee against the volume opportunity?
We have some very large partners that require us to be competitive from that standpoint, but it is a good thing. You do hear, "Gee, you sold your soul to do work for the government." But we are okay with it. We were competing with those that did go lower, but we didn't feel that was necessary and won the business.
Like their peers in corporate travel, government and university travel managers are concerned about access to content. We understand why suppliers like JetBlue or EasyJet are not willing to pay global distribution system fees, but could they not hook in to systems like GetThere?
There are a few different options. With AgentWare--for our Web Connect product--it goes out to their sites and then makes [that content] available. It still is in the product, but it does appear on the side if [that supplier] is not in the GDS. Also with AgentWare as a partner, we work on direct connections to bring in that content. In some cases, we integrate it into the actual availability path so it looks as if you are still in GetThere. There are some customers who really want their travelers to know that this is a separate transaction, and so you see it on the side, press the button and go into a browser on [the supplier's] site.
If opportunities come up for a direct connection with a carrier somewhere in the world that does not participate in a GDS, would GetThere prefer to develop that connection itself or have AgentWare do it?
In some cases, its most efficient to work with AgentWare. Our strategy has been to look for non-GDS carriers outside the U.S. as ones we would be interested in working with on a direct connect, depending on the value to the customer base. We have not announced any of those agreements.