<H1>GE, TTG Merge Systems</H1>By Cheryl Rosen
<I>Salt Lake City</I> - Another new technology partnership being announced this week holds out promise of improved travel management reports, as the GE Capital Corporate Card and WorldTravel Partners' Travel Technologies Group ink a deal to pull together data-and, hopefully, customers-into a single seamless system.
Under the terms of the alliance, GE and TTG will develop "proprietary programming" that merges data from TTG's new ResAssist 96 automated booking system and GE's corporate card into the QuickXpense expense reporting system.
As a result, the two companies promise, travel managers will be able to easily access reports that compare what travelers said they were going to do with what they actually did-and what vendors said they were going to charge with what they actually charged.
Mark Miller, GE Capital corporate expense management services senior vice president, said the link with TTG "rounds out a suite of products that gives our customers a user-friendly, fully automated process. Although we can both still work with other companies, the relationship between us is exclusive from the standpoint of the proprietary programming we are putting into this product."
In a corporate environment that is being inundated by new technologies, "we are dealing in the reality that ResAssist, our card and QuickXpense are all proven technologies with real customers," said GE Capital marketing vice president Mitch Gross. "That provides a safety net for our mutual customers, and allows us to focus on the linkages, the information and the process gains."
Gross said GE Capital has an existing base of 250,000 corporate cardholders, none of whom overlap with WorldTravel Partners' customers. TTG's ResAssist booking system, now in use by 35 customers, was the first Windows-based product on the market when it came out in 1993, and the technology company has seen sales growth in the $4 million to $8 million range every year, said Danny Hood, who is TTG's executive vice president and has just been named president of corporate travel and technology at parent company WorldTravel Partners in Atlanta.
Both sides declined to comment on the terms of their relationship, other than to say that GE will be offered "favored pricing" on ResAssist "in return for distribution."
Hood said linking expense reporting and booking data allows travel managers who have a contract rate of $95 with a hotel, for example, to pull up reports showing "not only that their travelers are upgrading for an additional $20, but that the hotel is charging them $110 as well."
What TTG brings to the party is the new and improved version of ResAssist, an "integrated Web-based booking system" that takes into account corporate policy and negotiated rates, and allows travelers to book not only a reservation but a seat in real time.
"When travelers look at a flight that has a $500 fare on an airline on which the corporation has negotiated a 10 percent discount, the system will display the fare as $450 at the point of sale," Hood said. "The corporate travel department can set the car size, the air class of service, the time windows it wants the system to offer travelers. And it can set up company plants as destination cities, so travelers can enter 'Research Triangle Office' rather than a city name and get flight information."
Atlanta-based Harbinger Inc. and Dell Computer Corp. of Austin, Texas, are among several ResAssist customers set to begin beta testing the Internet system in August. The product will be available for general release in the fourth quarter.
For technology neophytes, TTG will help customize a "Travel Department Web Page," and offer a software package that allows the travel manager to set up a page, add the corporate logo and load in travel policy, corporate rates, net fares and zone fares, preferred vendors, traveler profiles and other value-added services.
"There's a whole new role for travel managers in maintaining a virtual travel agency," Hood said. "In a lot of ways, the commission cap and the promise of net fares are driving the interest by forcing people to look at the cost of every transaction. We think these applications can cut the cost in half."
Twenty-five percent of WTP's bids now require an automated booking system, he said, and "that will grow on both the card side and the agency side. They all need to be putting a check in that box on the RFP."
End-To-End Interest
Gross called interest in end-to-end automated systems from the corporate card market "tremendous," and Hood predicted that the percentage of tickets booked through automated systems will rise from 10 percent next year to 20 the following year, and continue to increase in 10-percent intervals until it tops off at 50 percent five years from now. "Travelers want to book online, and the potential savings to the corporation is too big to ignore," he said.
TTG is offering three different pricing structures: a software license for $100,000 to $200,000-"a drop in the bucket for large corporations that spend $10 million in agency fees," Hood noted; a transaction-fee based model of $5 to 10 plus a $5,000 to $15,000 set-up charge; or a "gainsharing" program available to WTP corporate customers, under which the agency will take "a quarter for every dollar you save."
Hood expects ResAssist 96 to add $1 million to TTG's annual sales in 1997.