Expedia Redesigns Offerings

Online travel management company Expedia Corporate Travel today expects to launch a Web site redesign aimed at enhancing trip planning and booking and improving policy compliance.

The company's entire booking process has been revamped through a series of customizable tools designed to speed up the process and reduce the need for outside assistance.

Tom Wilkinson, senior vice president of Partnership Travel Consulting in Princeton, N.J., said Expedia's enhancements are incremental rather than revolutionary, but make the site cleaner, quicker and easier to navigate.

The redesign has been in the works for almost a year and many of the enhancements come from customer suggestions. "It looks like they've taken most, if not all, of our suggestions," said Terry Sullo, manager of travel and marketing trends at Expedia customer Akamai Technologies, "so we're looking forward to seeing this come together."

Expedia sees its most significant enhancement in users' ability to manipulate, add and book a flight, hotel and car rental all at once in "a shopping cart manner," said Expedia product manager Angie Weber. "It's dramatically more seamless for the traveler," she said. "It really speeds up booking a trip."

Additionally, a section on the homepage, called "Trip Central," allows users to look at pending trips and make itinerary changes or additions to flight, hotel, and car reservations, as well as view and exchange any unused airline tickets without the aid of an agent. "We've tracked and displayed unused tickets in the past, but this is the first time we've allowed the traveler to put those dollars towards a trip," Weber said.

The redesigned site also offers travelers the option of choosing premium economy class booking on some airlines—an economical upgrade from coach. Wilkinson said this feature only would appeal to a certain segment of business travelers. "Corporate travel managers may not want this option," he said. "They're always looking for the lowest logical airfare."

Giving users an "unprecedented level of control," is Expedia's Power Tools, according to Weber. The data download center gives expanded reporting time periods that allow managers to pull broad sets of data over one year, or a summary of up to two years, for year-over-year comparison. Wilkinson said the ability to search data up to two years is beneficial, even though a six to 13 month search is usually adequate.

Wilkinson believes the enhancements—many of which he noted already exist on other sites—give Expedia a new advantage. "This will be a competitive benefit," he said.