Expedia Corporate Travel this spring will get its own ARC number because Expedia wants to insulate business clients from the effects of such disputes as the one that late last year temporarily removed US Airways' content from the online agency
(BTNonline, Dec. 9, 2003).
"In December, we got our supplier-relations wake-up call because of a contract dispute with US Airways, which by the way was totally our fault," said Expedia Inc. and IAC Travel president and CEO Erik Blachford, speaking yesterday at The Masters Program in Washington, D.C. "We had Expedia Corporate Travel and expedia.com on the same ARC, and suddenly US Airways was not available on both sides. We managed to figure out how to book the carrier, though not online, before we happily resolved with US Airways on Christmas Eve."
In the meantime, though, such clients as Harvard University were frustrated enough that Blachford joked ECT president Matt Hulett "almost shot me." Blachford called the situation "an incredible test" that was not the first lesson for Expedia on how to serve the corporate market. "People sometimes accuse us of being arrogant and, in this case, it was justified," Blachford said. Corporate travel "is harder than it looks, and I can't say that often enough. Travel and procurement managers are paid to be skeptical, and you can't just claim a place in corporate travel--you have to earn your way in."
Blachford said that after Expedia entered the corporate market by buying Metropolitan Travel of Seattle
(BTN, July 15, 2002), the company faced an "uphill battle" to provide equal or better service to its inherited clients. "The Met clients said the service can't deteriorate at all, and in fact they wanted it to get better," he said. "Really you have to make the technology work to enable the service, as opposed to using the technology to replace the service, which is how it is on the leisure side." On reporting, he said, "we just had no clue, especially for big companies that have department codes and groups set up by the travel manager and they're tracking volume to support vendor agreements, etc."
The integration of Metropolitan Travel, Blachford said, "is pretty much over, and all the big customers we wanted to get on the platform are there. There are about 1,100 companies booking on ECT, and of those, over 80 percent are booking online. We think that 80 percent number will probably stick for a while."