Building on its acquisition earlier this year of Seattle's Metropolitan Travel
(BTN, July 29), Expedia yesterday launched a corporate travel offering in which it charges $5 for unassisted flight bookings and $20 for domestic, agent-assisted bookings. Hotel and car bookings without air are free, unless they require support, in which case they cost $10. Expedia said it is waiving a $149 account setup fee through year-end. A separate fee to load clients' negotiated air rates is roughly $500, depending on complexity.
Meanwhile, Expedia senior vice president of corporate travel Byron Bishop in an interview late yesterday with
BTN alluded to plans for a large-company program aimed for midyear 2003. While the current product lacks most policy enforcement tools and such other features as negotiated hotel rates, Expedia will add more functions for heavily managed programs. A global presence of some sort, also, would be warranted, said Bishop. "The sales cycle is already going on now for our midyear release," he said, "so we're actively building out our salesforce."
The new program, Expedia Corporate Travel, offers a handful of features useful to companies with lightly managed travel programs. A travel arranger view complements the travel manager interface, which offers downloadable reports, user profile management, messaging and other features. In the traveler interface, preferred airlines are flagged with a handshake icon, and itineraries can be downloaded into Microsoft Outlook. The product also tracks for companies their usage of several airline soft-dollar business incentive programs.
"We're focused on making sure we have a price that delivers most of the value that customers now get for paying $40 to Metropolitan for an offline booking," Bishop said. "The competition now is the regional or mega agencies that are underserving the lightly managed clients while charging a full managed price."
The Bellevue, Wash.-based company is backing its corporate offering with a dedicated team of agents who have an average of 12 years experience in corporate travel management, as well as a pledge to answer 80 percent of all calls within 20 seconds, officials said.