E-Mtg., Travel Cos. Team Up: Offer Attendees Air Booking At Registration - 2002-04-22

Three online travel and meeting companies have banded together to offer an integrated application that enables meeting attendees to book air travel at negotiated rates at the point of online registration—the third such product in the marketplace.

Meeting portal StarCite and Cardinal Communications—creator of the RegWeb attendee management application—have aligned with Outtask's upstart online booking engine, Cliqbook, to allow attendees to book air online. Cliqbook will compare and offer meeting fares, negotiated corporate fares and Web fares in accordance with the travel policies of the corporation holding the event.

The new product allows buyers to choose any travel agency for ticket fulfillment and use any global distribution system, and allows planners to set parameters for fare booking choices for every meeting. Outtask CEO Tom DePasquale said the new application, publicly introduced last week, already has one corporate customer, whom he declined to name. Two dozen more currently are evaluating the product, he said. "Corporations have not taken advantage of their total purchasing power, and they haven't aggregated it as a bargaining chip with vendors," DePasquale said.

The move may elicit some surprise, as both StarCite and Cardinal—which have allied together since early 2001—are relatively established players in the online meetings management space, but Cliqbook has been only recently developed, with its first three corporate customers signing on in January. "There hasn't been enough time or attention paid to the group market to make things work," said StarCite CEO John Pino, when asked why his company optioned against aligning with a more established online booking system. "We love the Cliqbook tool. It's the simplest and very powerful, and everyone including the CEO was actively involved in making this a reality."

Planners using the tool would begin at the online marketplace at StarCite's Web site, where requests for proposals for meetings services could be sent to hotels, airlines and other providers. Once contracted, a custom Web site featuring RegWeb's registration capabilities would register attendees and capture billing data and allow them to book air through Cliqbook. "It's a stand-alone product. We can tie into any agency to fulfill tickets and meet the terms of any contract," said Mark Phillips, StarCite vice president and general manager. StarCite will charge a variable—and not yet finalized—annual subscription fee for use of the product, and Outtask will charge a transaction fee per booking that also is variable, but less than $5.

The previous two such alliances both were developed last year: GetThere and its meetings subsidiary, GetThere DirectMeetings, in August (Meetings Today, Aug. 14, 2001) and SeeUthere and TRX in October (Meetings Today, Nov. 12, 2001).