GetThere Makes Gains In Europe

GetThere has pronounced its online booking system finally workable for Europe, three years after launching outside of the United States. It has drawn criticism in Business Travel News in recent months from such European launch clients as Credit Suisse First Boston, Electrolux and Danish Travel Pool for not adapting to the complexities of the market. However, such new clients as Capital Group, General Electric and Sony Europe all have confirmed GetThere's claims that it has fixed its major problems and is serving them well.

The Sabre-owned company now intends to go back to its early clients and implement the solutions it has mastered. "We accept the problems of the past and now we want to draw a line under them," said director of sales and marketing Peter Cornwall.

GetThere's list of direct corporate clients in Europe remains small—just 16 are on its books—although it also provides a booking engine for nine European airlines, including British Airways and KLM. Cornwall would not disclose how many bookings GetThere handles other than to say the number was in the hundreds but now is "in the thousands."

GetThere's problems with its "legacy" clients have left some unable to take their relationship beyond the pilot stage. "We've had travel managers tell us that they have been told to implement GetThere in Europe because it has been successful in the United States," said one such disillusioned customer. "We tell them it is likely to be a very different experience."

One of the most common complaints was that the low-fare search displayed numerous illogicalities. If a traveler specified they wanted to travel on a Tuesday morning, for instance, he instead would receive flight options for Tuesday night, with a list of return flights first thing on Wednesday morning following for good measure. The search also would fail to take account of the client's preferred carriers.

GetThere pointed out that fare searches have to be wider in Europe because schedules are less dense and competition is less intense, making low fares more difficult to find. However, new clients—albeit some still in early pilot stages—supported GetThere's claim that it has solved the problem.

"The low-fare search works. We have a lot of net rates and the system is able to grab published and special fares," said Tanja Sauermann, assistant travel manager for Sony Europe, which started a pilot on Sept. 11 with 50 travelers at its headquarters in Berlin.

Comparisons of published and nonpublished fares have been more tricky in Scandinavia, owing to a bug in Amadeus. However, GetThere international director of product marketing Johnny Thorsen said his company was "working around the problem."

There also is criticism that some features remain relevant for the U.S. market only, but GetThere is continuing to "Europeanize" its product. It now is available in German and French, as well as English, and Thorsen said Spanish and Portuguese will follow by Jan. 1.

Thorsen admitted that certain complications remain. Some European companies negotiate percentage discounts rather than flat fares with airlines, but GetThere only can compute these if they are in the global distribution systems. Thorsen said most airlines now load these by default. GetThere also owns up to not having cracked hotel bookings, in part because fewer European properties are in the GDSs. Thorsen, therefore, advised corporations to use specialized online hotel booking consolidators, such as NetBook of Sweden and HRS of Germany.

GetThere's newer clients generally are pleased with the improved version they are using, although they all are encountering various challenges. These reflect the complexity of the European market, rather than faults with GetThere itself. "It's going well," said Stephanie Dillon, Los Angeles-based travel, meetings and events manager for Capital Group. "We have rolled it out with more than 100 travelers in the United Kingdom and now are rolling it out elsewhere in Europe. The challenge was to find a tool that worked with different GDSs. GetThere was the only one that made us feel comfortable about that.

"Our travel agents in the United Kingdom and Switzerland both use Galileo, which presents its own problems, and GetThere has taken great care to see the connections are functioning," Dillon continued. "It was also very attentive to the details of our low-fare search, such as by capturing gray fares that we couldn't get through the Galileo link."

General Electric started a pilot with 150 users in Germany on Sept. 10 and the following day's events in the United States meant that as of Oct. 3 only 30 bookings had been made. Nevertheless, GE travel manager for Europe Keith Mullineux said: "If it can take 30 bookings, it can take 3,000. There are still a few things to fiddle with before I am prepared to roll it out to the rest of Germany, but it will happen in the next 30 days."

Teething problems have included mistakes in profiles—due to internal errors, Mullineux said—plus sorting out how to handle Lufthansa's Pay As You Fly scheme and dealing with the anomalies of the Air France internal reservations system.

"The problems are not unique to GetThere," he said. GE is using Sabre's Business Travel Solutions in the United Kingdom, where the frustration is not being able to include the many flourishing low-cost carriers, most of which do not make their inventories accessible via the GDSs.

Sony also is experiencing early difficulties, which it attributed to Amadeus rather than GetThere. These include glitches in profile administration and loading negotiated car rental rates. Otherwise, Sauermann said, "I love it. It has been developed by people with a detailed knowledge of the market and it is very clear and user-friendly."

GetThere believes the problems with its launch clients were caused less by offering a deficient or U.S.-centric product than by failing to manage over-ambitious expectations. "This involves complex change management," Thorsen said, "and a lot of companies underestimated that challenge."