Mtgs., Booking Form Links

<B>Mtgs., Booking Form Links</B>
<I>End-To-End Web Solution On The Horizon</I>

By Chris Davis

Two major deals between meeting portals and online booking systems are raising the hopes of corporate meeting and travel managers alike that a network of alliances covering every aspect of Internet meeting management and air and hotel booking is on the way. Buyers cautioned, however, that exclusive deals between vendors could scuttle the benefits of alliances.

The partnerships--StarCite and E-Travel, and EventSource and Sabre Business Travel Solutions, both announced within the past two months--point to a near future where site selection, registration and booking tools for meetings and transient travel can all be placed on the corporate intranet, giving planners, attendees and travelers the convenience of a unified system for all travel needs.

"We're absolutely interested, since this fills a piece of the fulfillment part of the system," said Earl Foster, director of global travel management for Joseph E. Seagram & Sons of New York. "The portals are reacting to the demand that meeting planners and corporate travel managers have to fulfill both ends. It's an automatic fit."

According to Hewlett-Packard Co.'s meetings program manager Rich Del Colle, the company now uses GetThere.com for online booking, and meeting portals AllMeetings.com and B-there.com for attendee management, so "from a selfish standpoint, a hypothetical alliance there would be the best for H-P. If I could get an alliance like that, I could put it all on the intranet: meetings budget and cost-analysis tools, booking functionality and meeting logistics tools. It would be a great solution."

There's no need for corporations to break down walls between their meetings and travel programs to see the benefits of such partnerships, Del Colle added. "Transient wouldn't touch meetings as such, but it would be a convenient and very familiar process for everyone," he said.

As for GetThere's plans, "It's fair to say our approach to the meetings market will be a blend of our own internal capabilities and external partners," said Jeff Palmer, vice president of strategic development at GetThere. "Our customers and other meeting tech companies are interested in working with us and we want to work with direct connections to lodging companies in that field. It's a natural extension of our transient business."

Palmer said GetThere wants to have an end-to-end solution in place, either developed internally or through alliances, before offering new products to its clients. "We want to have the site selection, registration, booking and reporting pieces all set. Anything else is a false start," he said. "But there's interest from travel managers, even if they don't have direct meeting responsibilities. Even though they have their separate and distinct problems to solve, meetings and transient travel overlap enough that a similar approach to both makes sense."

Rob Wald, director of product marketing for E-Travel, which is wholly owned by Oracle Corp., sees his company's alliance with StarCite as a reaction to corporations' desires for unified meeting and transient solutions. "There's a good opportunity to resolve the problem of having two separate solutions for creating meetings and booking transient travel," he said. "It allows corporate travel directors to get their arms around meetings and transient spending. This alliance can do that very effectively."

There is no guarantee of exclusivity on either side of the StarCite/E-Travel alliance, which Foster said is a positive development for both corporate travel and meeting managers. "It would be a shame if they developed exclusive partnerships," he said. "If I have one booking system and a preferred meeting portal and they don't link up with each other, what do we do then? Dump the booking system entirely? The portals need representation from all booking systems."

Glenn Bingham, president of meeting portal AllMeetings.com, which has not yet formed a partnership with a booking system, said vendors are unlikely to form many exclusive alliances. "All systems, whether they're attendee management sites, booking systems and sites like our own, are looking to partner up with just about everyone, even if it's just at a marketing level," Bingham said. "It's safe to assume we are having those conversations as well."

But, as evidenced by recent, separate deals between attendee management site Passkey.com and competing portals PlanSoft and EventSource (see story, page 16), exclusivity is not the norm in the vast majority of these alliances, Bingham said. "These are not generally exclusive, particularly with the back-end booking tools," he said. "As far as I know, there's no contractual reason we couldn't have the same exact relationship with Sabre BTS, for example, as EventSource does. Nobody out there is closing out any options, and my impression is that the back-end bookers want to work with everyone." EventSource guaranteed Sabre as the portal's exclusive global distribution system, but did not receive portal exclusivity in return.

The online meetings industry still is trying to figure out whether to move in the direction of a few exclusive relationships between portals, attendee management sites and booking sites, or a tangled melange of alliances allowing planners more options through each site. Bingham sees that latter as the more likely possibility. "There doesn't have to be tightly integrated solutions," he said. "Tech advances, like the advancement of the XML standard, make this process easier to happen and the Web world is finding it's easier to hook up with other entities."

Eventually, as meeting portals work their way into the consciousness of travel departments, some companies likely will designate a specific portal or a specific alliance as a preferred vendor, perhaps at some point including it in official travel policy.

"It's definitely a possibility," said EventSource president and CEO Ed Sarraille. "Sabre's such a well-known name, and that gives us the ability to be put in front of hundreds of Fortune 1000 companies. We want to do that because we can customize our site to meet the corporate preferred vendors, and attendees can book everything right there. If you can provide that service cost-effectively, you can be a preferred vendor, and we're all fighting for that."

Even without inclusion in policy, the portals are banking on further interest from corporations in developing tighter ties between their meeting and travel departments.

"We can see the further merging of meetings and transient travel coming in some undefined way," said StarCite CEO John Pino. "What we see clearly is the desire of the corporation to harness the negotiating power of both in an integrated way. We need to be a solution in that realm, and we will be. The E-Travel deal gets us in front of a good slice of Corporate America.