Travelport Adds Contract-Mgmt. Partner

Cendant's Travelport online booking tool is set to partner with Travel Analytics to help clients maximize air deals through automated policy management. The parties expect a deal within weeks, with implementation quickly following.

Travelport clients can set parameters allowing travelers to book non-preferred carriers, instead of preferred airlines, if the cost differential on a given ticket is large enough. Travel Analytics will feed data showing how close a company is to hitting negotiated volume targets, and the Travelport system will adjust the parameters accordingly. If a target is close to being reached, the differential between preferred and non-preferred airlines will be narrowed. If in danger of being missed, the differential can be widened.

"We will program in triggers to change the value as we go, depending on progress with the deal," Travelport chief product officer Dean Sivley said, adding the changes likely at first are to be made manually on clients' top 25 city pairs. Ultimately, the policy management system is intended to recalibrate the parameters automatically in response to Travel Analytics data.

"We will apply proprietary technology and methods to analyze buyers' positions on contracts and quantify the cost or benefit of any potential implications for the contract," said Travel Analytics CEO Scott Gillespie. "In principle, we should be able to tune the booking engine very finely to the policy of the corporations and provide very specific total cost perspectives at the point of sale."

The partnership, which also includes Travelport recommending Travel Analytics for benchmarking and negotiation support, fits Gillespie's vision of travel management as a three-part process that requires little help from an agency. The first part is trip management, as most transactions can be made online. The second is stakeholder management—dealing with travelers, bookers and senior management—best handled by a travel manager. The third is spend management, such as sourcing, benchmarking and policy analysis, much of which can be outsourced to consultants, he said.

"With Travelport you get the tool for the trip management piece and you get us for spend management. Why do you need an old-fashioned travel agent?" asked Gillespie.