Kirkland, Wash.-based Nextel Partners last month became the first of several corporate clients to select self-booking, global distribution and fulfillment services from Cendant Corp.'s Travelport, launched at the National Business Travel Association convention last summer
(BTN, Aug. 25, 2003).
Meanwhile, to build its fulfillment services in Europe, Travelocity Business last week said it added a new partner in Manchester, England-based NIS Europe. Cendant also is partnering internationally for fulfillment, but likes to point out that it is the only "end-to-end" provider that owns all of its U.S. self-booking, GDS and fulfillment portions.
Nextel Partners, which markets Nextel Communications wireless products to businesses, is a fast-growing firm that generated $650 million in 2003 revenue, spending less than $10 million annually on air travel. It previously managed travel with Seattle's Metropolitan Travel, which was bought in 2002 by Expedia.
"The business travel industry is changing with different types of companies entering the market or altering their business to provide services," Nextel Partners travel manager Nancy Witt said. "This can be confusing and inefficient. We believe having all services and points of contact with one company is definitely the way to go."
According to Travelport COO Kurt Ekert, Nextel and others followed Cendant itself—which books more than $60 million in ARC volume—into the Travelport Fulfillment offering. Travelport Fulfillment's operations center is in Nashville, Tenn., where Cendant Travel also handles about $1.7 billion in mostly membership and leisure travel business. "We have had a major initiative underway that we call Zeppelin to drive touchless automation within the process," Ekert said. "With Nextel Partners, we're seeing touchless rates of over 80 percent."
He said the Zeppelin project is using both internal and third-party technologies to build Travelport Fulfillment's corporate capabilities and scalability. Ekert said the target market includes firms in the bottom half of what Travelport calls midmarket, which is a range of $3 million to $30 million in ARC volume.
"Legacy corporate travel management companies market themselves on high touch and high service," Ekert said. "Then there are the new-generation offerings trying to drive to unassisted transactions. We're trying to bridge the gap between them. We will be successful in that we're not asking customers to fundamentally alter their behavior. We're not asking them to abandon their supplier relationships, and we're not trying to push consumer merchant inventory on them. We want to make sure we're providing inventory that meets the needs for corporate travel."