GetThere Plans To Build Collaboration Suite

Republished with permission from The Beat.

The Beat ~ a travel business newsletter
Lombard, Ill.
Sept. 29, 2009

GetThere unveiled plans for a new suite of collaboration tools to help corporations maximize the return on investment of travel, meetings and virtual meeting options. The next generation of the 15-year-old online booking tool is to be called a "Collaboration Suite" and include a "return on invested collaboration calculator," social networking functionality, meeting planning tools and collaboration inventory management covering air travel booking to remote conferencing services, according to GetThere chief marketing officer and Sabre Travel Network corporate segment strategy and solutions vice president Suzanne Neufang.

GetThere today at its European customer summit in London planned to detail the "patent-pending collection of solutions" to more than 100 corporate travel and procurement professionals and travel management company product distributors.

"2009 taught us that it is really about travel decision management," Neufang told The Beat. "It's not just how you travel, but whether you travel." As more customers install videoconferencing suites, Neufang said GetThere increasingly has been asked "to be more of a collaboration/decision-management partner. It is all about establishing the ROI or ROIC (return on invested collaboration) of the various types of collaboration."

The new suite is "intended to be a CIO's logical choice for making sense of the various desktop, telecommunications and software-as-a-service-based employee workflow tools," according to a GetThere statement. It also represents the continued evolution of GetThere from an online booking tool to travel procurement provider to collaboration management tools.

The new ROI calculator will help companies weigh travel and alternate options, based on business value expectations. Neufang demonstrated an early version to summit participants, showing a sliding scale calculator that could reside on the travel portal. It includes drop-down lists of various types of travel or meeting with corresponding factors to evaluate ROI. For example, for a sales call, an employee would estimate the potential revenue increase, revenue retention or cost savings of the client meeting; the number of meetings held with the client in the past year; individual potential influence on the client; face-to-face value; and estimated trip cost. Based on responses and weights defined by each corporation, the calculator would recommend either travel or alternatives. In some instances, additional approvals could be necessary.

In the first phase of the calculator, criteria for each type of business travel or meeting would likely be the same, with generic wording, but "some of the weighting" could be configured by the corporation, Neufang said.

Sabre Research, the business unit that helped American Airlines create yield management, is helping GetThere define the "algorithmic technology" for each type of business travel. Sabre said it would then validate the data with clients as part of several rounds of usability testing. "We do have some homework to do on this," according to Neufang, who anticipates a 2010 roll-out.

In the ROI prototype, the traveler would click a booking options button to view GetThere's airline flight availability, availability of internal or external collaboration tools and tutorials on how to use audio or videoconferencing options. Part of Sabre's plan, Neufang said, is to contract with videoconferencing providers--starting with the high-definition offerings of Cisco's TelePresence and Hewlett-Packard's Halo--as well as hotels that have invested in such technologies or others with inventory. "We do that pretty well with other types of supplier content," she said. "This is just matching what we really do already for airlines and hotels with other types of products."

To enhance the ROI tools, Neufang said companies could survey employees to identify realized revenue or savings. She also envisions other types of reporting.

To be released in phases starting next month, the Collaboration Suite also is to include cubeless, Sabre's enterprise community platform. Although Sabre has sold cubeless to both commercial and non-profit organizations, this will be the first time it has packaged it with GetThere to allow customers "to tap into the collective intelligence of a workforce to facilitate knowledge sharing, networking via questions, answers and exploration tags, and destination advice." Corporations and their travelers also can "share itineraries" and facilitate the sharing of rides, meals or other activities. By 2010, GetThere plans to add traveler hotel reviews to the social media mix.

By year-end, the suite also is to include "integrated meetings capabilities" with GetThere's meeting technology partners. "In the midmarket, very likely we'll have prepackaged solutions to make it easier to deploy," she said. Larger customers will be able to select one of GetThere's meeting technology partners.

Sabre and GetThere officials began brainstorming the new functionality this year. "The team, all the way up to [Sabre Holdings CEO] Sam Gilliland has been talking about ROI in 2009. We've had some light-bulb moments; this is one from midsummer," Neufang said. "This is certainly a game changer to connecting the dots in the collaboration space within a company."

But the new suite also could force GetThere to change its transaction-based financial model. "It's too early to tell" how Sabre will charge for the new functionality, which Neufang said is more of a workflow tool. "In all likelihood this changes the game on the model," but officials plan to talk to "both finance and procurement leaders to get a better sense of how this plays into the value that they expect from us and the innovation that they expect to driving a program that is more and more optimized.

"The real story for us is that we learned in 2009 that we are really good at helping companies turn off travel," she added. "While that certainly was effective for the companies that wanted to save a boatload of money quickly, many of those same companies are realizing that the approach to turning off travel across the board didn't help their business growth at all."

An Oxford Economics study commissioned by the U.S. Travel Association and a separate study paid for by the National Business Travel Association and American Express highlighted the financial risks associated with cutting or eliminating business travel.

~Mary Ann McNulty

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