Car Service Res Consolidates

Saturn Reservation Systems, a Web-enabled, centralized reservations provider, last week merged with Interride, a back-end reservations technology firm, to form GT3.

The new company brings to a fragmented car services industry a single third-party reservations solution that offers buyers and suppliers back-office, booking and reporting capabilities.

The company, as of last week, still was contacting clients about the merger.

For corporate customers, GT3, which stands for Ground Travel Technology Team, will continue to provide the single-source booking technology previously offered by Saturn—and used by such companies as Hewlett-Packard and Educational Testing Service—through which bookings on Sabre, Apollo and Worldspan for rides from multiple vendors can be accounted for with data reporting capabilities. "Early indications suggest that we will become as ubiquitous in ground transportation as Pegasus Solutions is in hotels or Sabre in air travel," said GT3 CEO and former Interride president Apurva Patel.

Patel and Gary Goldberg, GT3 COO and former Saturn president, are seeking to secure agreements for self-booking tools beyond current agreements with Sabre's GetThere and TRX's ResAssist. The technology also can process reservations data from supplier Web sites and corporate intranet applications.

Meanwhile, GT3 will continue to supply back-end dispatching, tracking and accounting technologies that Interride provided to car services companies of various sizes, including BostonCoach and individual Carey locations. GT3 will charge a transaction fee to suppliers rather than corporate customers. Buyers will receive booking data and complete reports that break down such ancillary charges as wait time, tolls and in-car mobile phone use. "There are a limited numbers of suppliers in the industry that have the budget to create their own technology, so one thing we can do as a company is continue to develop and upgrade our technology," Goldberg said.

GT3's booking technology will handle local and national car reservations by working with both national vendors and mini-sectors, such as black car services within New York City. The company also will offer searches by lowest-cost supplier and round-the-clock call center support for offline and last-minute reservation changes, which immediately will alter the passenger data stored within the aggregate system.

At this point, GT3 and suppliers' services can get muddled in their overlap. While Patel emphasized that GT3's services allow car services suppliers to concentrate on "what they do best"— namely timely pickups—many suppliers have invested in fine-tuning their own staffed call centers and data collection systems. However, last-minute changes called in to these centers would not register in GT3's system. "We found that based on research, the car companies' core competency is their dispatch process." This also limits the value-add services that some car services companies are selling to buyers in a competitive market and could keep buyers focused on best-price service.

"This industry is on the cusp of automating technology," Patel said, "and we've kind of been beating the drum for the past six or seven years."