Delta Finally Debuts Site That Offers Small Biz Incentives

<B>Delta Finally Debuts Site That Offers Small Biz Incentives</B>

By David Jonas

Delta Air Lines last week finally launched its Mind Your Own Business Travel Web site dedicated to small businesses. The site, offering both Delta bookings and reservations for other travel suppliers, including other airlines, follows the carrier's earlier introduction of direct online booking for larger companies (BTN, Jan. 29). Though Delta's special Web fares are excluded, the program is complete with corporate incentives--including some fare discounts-- while devoid of all transaction fees.

"Small corporations will respond favorably to these types of products that provide value and utility," said Henry Harteveldt, senior travel analyst at Forrester Research in Cambridge, Mass. "There is a lot of money at stake in the small business market and MYOBTravel will compete vigorously for it."

MYOBTravel was designed for companies with fewer than 50 travelers and below $500,000 in annual air spend, a market segment Delta said accounts for as much as 35 percent of its revenue but has been "historically underserved" by travel suppliers.

The site has been beta tested since November by 300 of those companies after an initial announcement almost a year ago (BTN, April 24, 2000).

"A lot of these small businesses are booking through agencies but are paying as much as $25 per ticket in fees," said Mary Hyder, Delta's manager of e-business marketing. "So this is a huge opportunity because of how fast that market segment is growing."

Delta said MYOBTravel, aligned as a "full-scale online travel solution," has a competitive advantage over similar sites at other airlines and other online agencies, such as Travelocity and Expedia.

For starters, as a separately branded site, travelers can access fares from all carriers, not just Delta, and any other suppliers listed in the Worldspan reservation system. Hotel information is provided by Pegasus. Therefore, unlike Delta's direct booking system for larger corporations, small businesses can search for lower, non-Delta fares available for a given itinerary. "Customers told us we needed to offer all suppliers because Delta doesn't go everywhere they need to go," Hyder said. Delta, like any other online agency, receives commissions for bookings on other carriers.

On the flip-side, because MYOBTravel was designed and is supported by Delta, travelers and travel arrangers can rest assured that it won't quickly fail like so many fly-by-night dot-com travel sites. And more to the point, corporations earn various incentives for Delta bookings and can tailor user preferences to aid in the travel management function.

Incentives come in several forms. Notably, a corporation receives a discount on the first, fifth and 10th bookings through the site, representing 10 percent, 20 percent and 30 percent off the published fares, respectively. Travelers grab an extra 1,000 bonus SkyMiles for each booking, in addition to regularly earned frequent flyer points, and travel arrangers--up to three designated per company--also get bonus miles.

"What sets us apart is that we offer user-defined profiles," Hyder said. "The system remembers all of your loyalty numbers, hotel preferences and airline preferences, even airlines other than Delta."

Travel managers, meanwhile, can access real-time, downloadable data to track corporate spending. That data, which includes all information typically found on the PNR, can be broken out by city pair and by supplier, for example.

Upgrades, which Delta claimed was not one of the highest priorities initially spelled out by customers, currently are not available, but could be added down the road. Also not available are heavily discounted Web specials frequently offered to the general public at delta.com. "We started this project from ground zero 18 months ago and feel we have built the site in record speed," Hyder said. "But we were not able to link into the Deltamatic reservation system and only are pulling published fares from Worldspan."

Harteveldt didn't buy it. "If they have a Web fare or anything else available to either the general SkyMiles base or the general traveling public, it should be made available through MYOBTravel, especially since it is available now for the larger corporations," he said. "It is a critical flaw and hopefully they can work out a resolution."

Ironically, it was those Web specials sought by corporate travel managers that first triggered development of Delta's direct corporate booking for larger buyers (BTN, Aug. 2, 1999).

In designing the site, Delta teamed with well-known industry players in addition to Worldspan, which it partially owns, and Pegasus. Waltham, Mass.-based E-Travel, a provider of self-booking tools for larger corporations--having landed Delta as its first airline customer--supplies the site's booking engine. TRX of Atlanta, meanwhile, provides 24-hour customer support meant to mirror the service Delta's passengers normally receive, including rebookings and other support functions.

Delta and Northwest Airlines have been racing to provide online corporate booking functionality. Delta's direct model for large clients beat Northwest's CorpNet, which still is in the final stages of implementation. However, Northwest's E-Biz perks, a revenue-based Internet program for smaller companies, easily beat MYOBTravel when it went live in late 1999 (BTN, Oct. 11, 1999), though it does not yet offer non-Northwest bookings. Dedicated small business Web sites at Alaska and Southwest Airlines also do not include inventory from competitors.

Delta's goal is to enroll 3,000 corporations by year-end. "That is an aggressive number. It may be easy to get corporations to sign up, but not as easy to get them to use it," Harteveldt said. "The site design is good and gives Delta a respectable start out of the gate, but its advantage will be short-lived because it is only a matter of time before all the other majors react.