E-Travel, GetThere Ink Links

<B>E-Travel, GetThere Ink Links</B>

By Cheryl Rosen

In a rapidly evolving technology marketplace, it's tough to make it alone--and that's especially true in the travel industry, where the goal is a fluid end-to-end solution. This may be why two online booking systems are announcing deals that will link them more closely with other suppliers in the travel technology space.

E-Travel Inc. this week will announce a pact with Sato Travel of Arlington, Va., the nation's seventh largest corporate travel agency, under which Sato will provide low-cost fulfillment service--including ticketing, quality control, 24-hour service and data warehousing--to E-Travel customers. Meanwhile, GetThere.com last week announced its GetThere Application Network, through which it is building links with a gaggle of expense reporting suppliers.

The E-Travel deal is designed to speed up the return on investment in online booking systems through lower agency fees. While many corporations already have negotiated lower transaction fees for bookings that need no human intervention, many still have not.

E-Travel president and CEO John Ackermann said the Sato deal "will provide savings of up to 70 percent compared with what we are seeing being charged today. A lot of customers asked us to provide this service, since they did not see the savings they had expected from their travel agencies when an automated booking system was in place."

A recent study of multiple clients by Management Alternatives of Stamford, Conn., found transaction costs under the traditional model range between $32.82 and $70.76, Ackermann said, and with the Sato model, costs are 50 to 70 percent lower.

The deal with Sato is not exclusive, and even E-Travel considered "five other companies that were interested in getting involved in this area" before signing. While Ackermann declined to name names, TRX (formerly known as the Travel Technologies Group) is probably the best known player to focus on Internet fulfillment, handling Microsoft's Expedia leisure travel site and the Continental and US Airways Web sites (<I>BTN,</I> Mar. 6). Ackermann said E-Travel may sign one more fulfillment partner now, "and others may come up in the future."

Four E-Travel customers will begin using Sato for fulfillment beginning in April, Ackermann said, though he again declined to name them, citing confidentiality agreements. But "one has expressed a desire to put all their volume through this model," he said, "while the other three are looking at a mixed environment where all the automated transactions will be handled by Sato and the others will be handled by their agency at the higher fee."

Sato vice president Tim Greene said the agency plans to offer a pricing menu from which customers can choose what they want "in terms of ticketing, upgrades, reporting, itinerary delivery and 24x7 call center support." The agency "sees this marketplace developing and the demand for this channel growing, and we want to be supportive."

Formerly airline owned and focused on the government market, Sato in January 1999 was acquired by an investment group (<I>BTN,</I> Jan. 25, 1999).

Meanwhile, GetThere rolled out the GetThere Application Network, offering an XML interface between the online booking system and other suppliers and buyers who conduct commerce on the Internet. For now, the network includes five big names in automated expense reporting--Ariba, Captura, Concur, Extensity and Gelco--but the goal also is to integrate with other B2B e-commerce applications, such as human resources and corporate procurement, beyond just travel.

"There is an opportunity to use travel as the catalyst to drive adoption of e-procurement of all kinds of goods and services by corporate employees," said GetThere president Gadi Maier.