<B> Rosenbluth, Xtra Align</B>
<I>Xtra On-Line Becomes Mega's Exclusive Booking Tool</I>
By Mary Ann McNulty
Rosenbluth International of Philadelphia has teamed with Xtra On-Line Corp. of Dallas to exclusively provide the booking and policy compliance engines for a Rosenbluth-labeled automation product, slated to debut in January.
Rosenbluth executives said the agency will continue to support the technology its clients choose, but XOL's PowerTrip will be the only booking engine it integrates with its proprietary reporting, profile management and pre-trip approval software.
Rosenbluth still is evaluating third-party expense reporting software and plans to select more than one option to be integrated with its other end-to-end travel management offerings. Vice president of marketing and CIO Neal Bibeau said at least one expense product will be selected by the first quarter of 1999 and fully integrated in a June release of @Rosenbluth.
In addition to Rosenbluth, agencies including McCord Travel Management of Chicago and Maritz Travel Co. of St. Louis have signed on as distributors, and XOL will continue to focus on attracting agency distributors. As an incentive, XOL has reduced its upfront distributor fees, but continues to charge monthly per-user fees of $3 to $12, depending on volume.
Maritz has yet to deploy PowerTrip to any of its corporate clients, according to Becky March, product director of technology marketing. A heavy Sabre user, Maritz has been waiting for Xtra to offer a more robust interface to that GDS, she said.
The @Rosenbluth product will allow corporate travelers to access all aspects of the travel management process from their personal computers, or to request assistance at any step in the process. The initial release of the software will be in English only, but deployment in other languages will begin in the second quarter of 1999.
"Our clients have had a lot of dissatisfaction with the levels of support they have received" from automated systems in the past, Bibeau said. "With @Rosenbluth, we'll provide call center support, context sensitive support, voice over IP (Internet telephony) and maybe even chat rooms. We're trying to make this not a technology play, but a full-service play. The key is to focus on client service."
Xtra On-Line will rely on Rosenbluth to sell its booking technology to corporations. Consequently, the software firm last month laid off about half of its 40 sales and marketing employees, including sales vice president Bill Malone, hired only in July.
"We think this deal does a couple of really great things," said Xtra On-Line CEO Bill Diffenderffer. "It legitimates our corporate strategy that one of the most respected agencies in the world has chosen us. We couldn't ask for a better endorser of our products than Rosenbluth."
In recent months, Diffenderffer said, XOL has found that the best way to get the attention of corporate travel managers is through their travel management companies. While depending on agencies to be its primary distribution channel, Xtra also has been marketing its product directly to the nation's 2,000 largest corporate travel buyers.
But XOL executives found that going direct to customers resulted in a sales process that in most cases exceeded five months, much longer than anticipated.
Despite the cash infusion of more than $15 million it received from private investors in August (<I>BTN,</I> Aug. 17), Diffenderffer said Xtra decided to reduce some of its operating expenses now to "keep everything going so well."
Said Diffenderffer, "You can only raise money when people don't believe you have a problem. We prefer to sell to agencies that in turn can service the clients. This is a much healthier model and it's going to deliver a much more satisfied customer."
When he and Paul Blackney, XOL's chairman, joined the company earlier this year, they developed a "push-pull strategy" for the corporate market--but found "the push works better than the pull," Diffenderffer said. "We will not rule out going to some corporations, but we'll let agencies take us further."
Bibeau said the integration of the XOL product with @Rosenbluth "will not preclude working with alternative solutions for corporate customers."
Executives also will work with the dozen Rosenbluth clients that now use its E-Res automating booking system and the four using Sabre's Business Travel Solutions to plot a migration path.
Adopting the tack taken by several of its competitors in recent months, Rosenbluth decided in July to seek third-party software rather than build its own booking and expense reporting.
Said president and CEO Hal Rosenbluth, "What most impressed us about Xtra On-Line was the open architecture of the booking software. Only with this type of open architecture could we integrate to the fullest extent possible."
Travelers will be able to access @Rosenbluth either through Rosenbluth's Internet site or their own corporate intranets. Recommended browsers are Netscape 4.0 and Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0.
Rosenbluth and Xtra said they expect to have 50,000 corporate travelers using the software by the end of 1999.
That's a prediction that consultant Bob Langsfeld of Langsfeld, Fazio Associates, Incline Village, Nev., is highly skeptical they'll be able to meet. "A lot of people have thought this was easy," Langsfeld said of integrating online booking systems.
Former customer Mike Kabo, now a consultant with Solutions Inc. of San Francisco and New York, questioned whether just one booking option will be robust enough for most of the agency's large corporate client base. Kabo agreed that "all agencies are going to have to have true user-friendly, value-added products if they expect to maintain any presence in the corporate market. The problem is that the corporate base is so diverse.