Rearden Expands Mobile Service Access

Rearden Commerce is expanding the reach of its Mobile Personal Assistant, making it compatible with any corporate booking tool and enabling its use through any smart phone model, the company announced today.

The Mobile Personal Assistant, which enables corporate travelers to manage itineraries and oversee other aspects of their trips through mobile devices, previously only was available through Rearden and the American Express Intelligent Online Marketplace, but "is now available to any corporation regardless of their current online booking tool," Rearden said.

Rearden vice president of worldwide sales Tony D'Astolfo told BTN that American Express already has deployed the booking tool-agnostic mobile platform with at least one undisclosed large, global client, whose travelers have been using the mobile tool since late last year. Still, D'Astolfo added, "This was not American Express-specific. They were the first ones to do it, but we expect if others want to do it, we'll enable it as well. There will be a little work on their side to set up the configuration and to feed to us, but once they do that, they could offer our mobile to any one of their customers independent of booking tool."

Rearden said it is suggesting its standard pricing of $1 per user, per month, but noted that agency adopters "can use it however they want."

Rearden in May 2008 released a BlackBerry application for the Personal Assistant online booking platform, followed more recently by an IPhone application, but "the mobile personal assistant will now be available on any smart phone," D'Astolfo said. "We built a mobile Web version, so it is now device agnostic. You don't need to download it in the mobile Web version: You can just reach out and grab it. If you have a Droid or Windows Mobile or whatever—including the iPad—you can now reach out and use the Rearden Mobile Personal Assistant regardless of the device it's using."

Despite the release of the mobile Web version, D'Astolfo said Rearden is "not necessarily" out of the application-building business. "There might be some footprints we still might want to develop, but this is a great way for us to get out there in general," he said. "We're not closing the door on any of that."

Rearden, meanwhile, also said it added another feature to its mobile platform: the enabling of mobile boarding passes, which has been embraced by more than a dozen airlines around the world and deployed at scores of airports. As such, travelers can checkin through their mobile devices and receive a bar code image that takes the place of their paper boarding pass. "Any airline that is using paperless boarding passes today," D'Astolfo said, "we can enable them through our mobile application." Rearden said the "location-aware" mobile platform also enables access to itineraries, travel alerts, restaurant search and reservations as well as local weather updates.