TravelOne Teams With E-Travel For Full System.

<FONT SIZE="+3"><B> TravelOne Teams With E-Travel For Full System</B>

By Stefani C. O'Connor

Mt. Laurel, N.J. - TravelOne has become the latest company to offer an end-to-end corporate travel solution as it unveils the final piece of a modular system-a real-time electronic reservations program for air, hotel and car rental.

The result of an alliance with software company E-Travel Inc., the product, also called E-Travel, features greater policy control for travel managers and greater flexibility for their travelers via laptop or desktop access. TravelOne expects to offer it both as a stand-alone module and bundled together with its ExpenseOne reporting product, thereby creating its version of an integrated end-to-end system for corporate clients.

The product is out of beta and running in at least one corporate site, Fidelity Investments. TravelOne president and CEO Jeff Harrow said that within 90 days, "three to four significant clients will be up and using the system," with at least one company bringing 1,500 travelers to the mix.

Executives from both TravelOne and E-Travel said the product is "the real thing," not to be confused with the plethora of products that have died a quick death over the past several years.

E-Travel, in business a little over two years, has kept a low profile in the industry "until we had a product that was actually working and that we could stand behind," said president John Ackermann. Toward that end, E-Travel has done a gradual rollout, with some 200 systems applications installed. "Rather than do everything at once, we recommend installing it in a pilot group and then moving from there as you gain experience with the system," he said.

The system is Windows-based, with a client server or TravelOne server sitting on a LAN and accessed through a user's PC or laptop. Clicking on a series of icons allows the travelers to access the appropriate choices; Ackermann estimated an entire trip could be booked with as few as seven mouse clicks.

The system contains detailed information including hotel amenities, seat maps, on-time arrival information and meal options. The choices are filtered according to a corporation's travel policy and the various levels of enforcement desired.

It's this policy management side that will drive the prominence of such reservations systems in the future, according to Harrow.

"If I'm a travel manager," he said, "my biggest concern when I put the power of making reservations in the hands of my travelers is what is going to happen to all the fabulous negotiations that have taken years to accomplish?"

To allay these concerns, the company has given the system customization capability. An agency or corporate travel manager can determine what will be shown on screen and what level of enforcement will be put in place, even as far down as the individual traveler-for instance, the CEO who hops the Concorde to save hours.

Time-saving tools include pop-up calendar screens and a function called repeat trip, which takes all the parameters of a traveler's previous trip and rebooks with new dates, coming back for options if availability hits a snag. TravelOne will adhere to its one-size-does-not-fit-all attitude and develop a price range to fit each user.

Last June, TravelOne invited a focus group of 15 corporate clients to look at the product. One attendee, Ginger Trefz, travel service supervisor for Okidata Inc., a computer printer and fax machine manufacturer in New Jersey, said her biggest concern was the cost benefit.

"Convincing your travelers to try something is not as difficult as the internal funding of the process," she said. "Obviously, your finance group wants to know if there's a payback."

Trefz said while she's not actively seeking an automated reservations process, she did see it coming in the future. Citing her company as conservative, however, she added "I'm not sure we would dive in. We don't want to be left behind, but we will enter it with caution to make sure it works before making a full-scale commitment."

Also expressing concerns about cost was Maynard Honesty, director of resource control for Shared Medical Systems, a Malvern, Pa., firm that makes software for the healthcare industry. "If someone brought me a package and said, 'here, it's $5,000,' I'd try that sucker today," he said. "But the big question is what it will take to do-in dollars and resources. We have 4,000 people with PCs and 2,000 travelers-what's the magnitude of the effort?" With $10 million in air volume, Maynard's company has been reviewing expense reporting systems and is now looking at the reservations piece for 1997, Honesty said.

Harrow expects the system to be used to a greater degree for domestic travel, but he won't rule out international travel. "We have built in the international capability to hand it right off to our pricing people," he said. "I'd hate to lose that and just have it priced by the CRS."

Harrow predicted that 20 percent to 30 percent of TravelOne's clients eventually would use the technology, but added that the system would never totally replace agents. "We do not think of this as an agentless system, where all you have to do is make a reservation and you never have to speak to a travel agent again," he said. "It's not a replacement of the call center; it's an additional tool to add value for customers."

TravelOne currently is the only distribution outlet for E-Travel, although the agreement between the two companies is non-exclusive.