Trip.com Acquires Thor's 24-Hour Service

<B> Trip.com Acquires Thor's 24-Hour Service</B>

By Cheryl Rosen

<I>Englewood, Colo.</I> - Beefing up the human touch behind its online travel services, Trip.com last month acquired Thor Inc., which provides round-the-clock human call answering services to travel agencies and, more recently, to ARC-certified Corporate Travel Departments, and its parent, Travel Industries Inc.

Thor (short for Twenty-Four Hour Online Reservations) also is among the nation's largest distributors of hotel rooms, selling rooms at 11,300 hotels to more than 16,000 travel agencies.

The acquisition will give Trip.com access to hotel discounts through Thor's Worldwide Negotiated Rates Program, as well as its international rate desk for pricing airfares.

Thor CEO John Baker said the deal will allow Thor to add another call center, double the number of agents on its staff from 8 to 16, and develop products it has had "in the wings for a few years now."

Most notable of these is Bolt, which allows travel agencies or consortia to gather and manipulate sales data in real time, and to chart whether they are on track to reach the thresholds promised to suppliers. In return, Trip.com "will help bring Web-based applications to our customer base," Baker said.

Thor will "continue to operate just as before," as an independent division of Trip.com, with no changes in management.

Trip.com, where "acquisitions are part of our ongoing strategy," was equally interested in Thor's 24-hour support and its hotel program, CFO William Skolout said.