Tooling Up For Security: GetThere, Agencies Add Intelligence Services

Sabre-owned GetThere today launched GetThere Travel Intelligence, the latest in a new wave of security products for travelers and managers, which enables corporations to monitor situations around the world and track, locate and contact traveling employees. The Menlo Park, Calif.-based company's new data offering, which is supplied by Annapolis, Md.-based IJet Travel Intelligence, is integrated with its online corporate travel reservations system.

Meanwhile, WorldTravel BTI today announced that it inked a letter of intent with IJet to offer similar services in April as an integrated part of WorldTravel's PeopleTracker offering.

The announcements of the new services follow last month's move by Rosenbluth International to begin rolling out its new three-part travel tracking and intelligence reporting product (BTN, Feb. 11). Meanwhile, American Express told Business Travel News that it soon would offer its corporate clients traveler security products.

Integrated into the GetThere DirectCorporate and DirectMidMarket online travel reservation products, GetThere Travel Intelligence offers the online booking company's 800 client companies an automated means of advising travelers as they review travel options and make their reservations. Categories covered in the reports that IJet provides to GetThere travelers include security, transportation, health, entry/exit requirements, financial, legal, communications, environment, culture, and language, said Jay GaBany, GetThere director of travel applications.

"Putting safety information close at hand allows travelers to make the best decisions they can and limits company liability in a crisis," GaBany said.

GetThere Travel Intelligence is a three-tiered service. The base-line service includes integrated itinerary-specific information that appears as a traveler makes reservations on the corporate travel site. GaBany said details for the trip also are consolidated on the printable itinerary page once a trip is booked.

The second tier of service is designed for frequent or long-stay travelers, who could use more in-depth travel information, said GaBany. "E-mails are sent to second-tier travelers whenever they make a booking," GaBany said. "The e-mails deliver more comprehensive itinerary reports, plus alerts that are sent directly to the traveler before, during and after a trip."

The third tier of the Travel Intelligence platform delivers data designed for the travel manager or security officer, he said. "It provides access to all active alerts and up-to-date destination intelligence for 156 countries. Managers may browse and search the database and direct the system to advise them when alerts for selected destinations are issued."

Importantly, he said, the third level of service has a traveler tracking component that allows travel managers to instantaneously locate travelers. "Reservation information from GetThere and the company's travel agencies is passed to IJet and is stored in its databases," GaBany said.

"The second and third levels of service are sourced directly through IJet," as part of the intelligence company's Worldcue suite of services, said GaBany. "But the first tier is a new service, unique to GetThere."

GaBany said pricing for the basic level of Travel Intelligence would be based on a yearly subscription for all employees, and the enhanced services would be priced on an annual subscription basis for specific employees. A free one-month trial period for all GetThere customers begins April 1, he said.

Cheryl Hutchinson, director of global travel at American Management Systems, will begin beta testing all three components of Travel Intelligence this week in her Airlines Reporting Corp.-certified Corporate Travel Department. Eighty percent of her 4,500 travelers have adopted GetThere since she implemented online booking in 1999.

"Although 80 percent of our travel occurs in North America and most overseas trips are to fairly conventional destinations," she said, "Travel Intelligence brings great value to our program. There could be a subway strike in Vancouver or London, or there could be unrest in Paris or Spain, and staying informed of such situations is beneficial to travelers."

Hutchinson appreciated that travel managers can tailor the messages that will appear with travelers' bookings. "This way, we do not burden travelers with messages," she said. "We only send them appropriate information."

Hutchinson said the value added to GetThere's system by the Travel Intelligence offering probably would drive adoption up by another 10 percent.

The marketing alliance between IJet and WorldTravel BTI means that clients who employ any part of the three-tier PeopleTracker suite will have the option of integrating IJet's Worldcue services into their programs at favorable rates, said WorldTravel president Danny Hood.

Interest in security among WorldTravel's clients is increasing exponentially, said Brenda Catanesi, vice president of technology integration. Within the past few months, "at least 75 percent of our top 200 clients have come to us asking about security and traveler tracking," she said.

Hood said demand for PeopleTracker has been so overwhelming that the company has barely been able to keep up. "We've deployed to 10 customers, and another 20 are in the process of implementation," he said. "We're rolling out the product as fast as we can." Hood expects to have 50 or more clients using PeopleTracker by year-end.

Hood said pricing for PeopleTracker is on a transaction fee basis, "starting at around 20 cents per transaction and going up to the $1.50 range as the services get more comprehensive." Pricing for the IJet Worldcue system through WorldTravel could vary from $0.75 to $14 per transaction.

Bruce McIndoe, CEO of IJet, said, "We've invested $17 million in building this company since we started in 1999, and now interest is really taking off."

McIndoe said IJet gathers intelligence from a repository of more than 5,000 sources and gives the average travel department subscriber 250 to 350 travel alerts per month.

"We draw information from Web sites, purchased content feeds and the GDSs," he said. "We also have human sources operating in 17 different languages, in every region of the world."

The IJet traveler tracking program features traveler profiles composed of agency, corporate and GDS information, McIndoe said. "We're the global aggregator of information for our clients. This enables a multinational company with 10 agencies to draw up-to-the-second traveler location information from us."

Twenty-two corporations have contracted IJet to provide services, including Archer Daniels Midland, Cigna, Prudential Financial, Texas Instruments and The World Bank. The retail cost for single travelers is around $25 per trip, McIndoe said, but corporate clients could expect to pay less than half that amount.

Chris Cloyd, travel coordinator at Decatur, Ill.-based agricultural company Archer Daniels Midland, has independently contracted with IJet since last October to provide safety and security information to her 16,000 travelers.

"Senior management thought it was a very good idea to beef up our traveler security capabilities," Cloyd said, "and IJet had the most impressive offerings. So far, the product has gone over well." Cloyd has placed a guide to IJet's Worldcue services on her company's Web site. "This way, employees understand the significance of e-mail bulletins and IJet's Web-based information."

John Berkley, American Express vice president of corporate travel marketing, said that on a client-by-client basis American Express is providing daily security reports based on State Department information via its reporting tool Portfolio Web Pretravel, and Portfolio E-mail Pretravel. "There is a charge for those reports," he said, "although we provided it for free for three months following Sept. 11.

"Many of our client companies have very strong internal security departments," he continued, "and they have been using our pre-trip reports to identify travelers who should receive intelligence reports from in-house or third-party travel intelligence suppliers." Berkley said 10 percent to 20 percent of American Express' clients contract with third-party security firms, such as International SOS, IJet or Intelgo.

In the second quarter of this year, American Express will formalize its delivery capabilities for safety and destination information. "We are going into beta testing with six clients to integrate information from two to four third-party data suppliers," Berkley said. "At the end of the second quarter, we're going to publish a list of preferred data providers based on the quality of their data and the security of their operations."

Rosenbluth International CIO John Dabek said, "The first component in the three-product Global Security Suite, a Web portal to which clients can go to get information from a security perspective, launched Feb. 15." Dabek said the second component, which pushes out e-mail alerts that are applicable to travelers' itineraries, would be available by the middle of this month. The two intelligence services are powered by the Miami-based Intelgo travel intelligence company, he said. The final component of the suite is a traveler tracking product, which Dabek said should be available by April 15. "This will allow travel managers to locate traveling employees in seconds, instead of hours," Dabek said, adding that the traveler tracking component is based on Rosenbluth's own proprietary technology.