GetThere Completes Global Upgrade of Corporate Booking Tool

Nadine Godwin

September 23, 2008
Travel Weekly

Technology vendor GetThere, which added to its corporate booking tool a unique portal for travel arrangers, said it has successfully switched all its 4,000 customers in 55 countries to the upgraded product.

Suzanne Neufang, GetThere vice president for product marketing and user experience, said the vendor turned its attention to travel arrangers — meaning anyone who books travel for company colleagues — because “this group popped out. We've seen this as a super user group.”

She said about 2% to 4% of all GetThere bookers account for about a third of all GetThere bookings, because many of them arrange travel for others. The vendor said its users booked $9.4 billion in travel last year. Therefore, she said, it was time for GetThere to focus on helping to make travel arrangers more efficient.

Michael Brophy, senior manager, public relations for GetThere, added that the company was in “ongoing conversations with all our clients, looking for ways to have the biggest impact on travel spend.”

To that end, a key feature is the ability of travel managers to target messages to travel arrangers regarding policy issues that need more attention or that have changed. The missives sit in a message box on the travel arranger's screen for as long as the sender believes necessary.

Stefanie Tretola, travel services manager for Mitre Corp. in Bedford, Mass., said Mitre used the message box to highlight the biggest policy issues, and this has already helped her company, a Carlson Wagonlit client with $15 million in annual air spending, “drive behavior within policy.”

She also said the new portal addressed another problem: the tendency for travel arrangers to accidentally book themselves on their colleagues' trips. Before the new portal became available, she said, the user was brought immediately to the initial search page, and travel arrangers would book themselves on trips if they forgot to immediately switch to a profile other than their own.

Today, the opening page for a travel arranger appears with a list of all travelers whom the arranger supports; the arranger clicks on the appropriate name to begin the booking process.

The home page for the arranger also includes an at-a-glance view of upcoming trips and other information related to the arranger's 10 most frequent and/or most important travelers.

Neufang said an expected byproduct of the new portal is better adoption rate, noting that the average adoption rate across all customers in 2007 was 71%. Brophy said Mitre's GetThere adoption rate was already 82%.

The relevance of the travel arranger feature varies by country and company. For example, Neufang said, most travel is booked by an arranger in China, whereas U.S. travelers tend to be more self-sufficient; Europe falls in the middle. Also, she said, “in technology companies, there is more self-sufficiency” than in other types of businesses.