GetThere - News Articles

GetThere Tops $6 Billion In '05

The Beat - a business travel newswire - Feb 7, 2006

Sabre Holdings raised eyebrows when it spent three quarters of a billion dollars to acquire self-booking tool provider GetThere.com in 2000, but it's hard to argue with figures the company released last week: GetThere in 2005 processed bookings for $6.3 billion in corporate travel and lodging, 31 percent more than in 2004.

Comparing the number to the online consumer giants shows how far corporate travel e-commerce has come. Travelocity's equivalent number was $7.4 billion last year. Gross travel booked at Expedia for the twelve months ending in September was about $15 billion.

One consultant speaking this week with The Beat was surprised by the GetThere figure, while another showed no surprise by saying, "They are the market leader." Indeed, but it is a low-key market. Consumer online travel agencies and their corporate-travel subsidiaries seem to get all the attention, but clearly the business of providing online self-booking tools to corporations and travel management companies also is a thriving one.

GetThere officials said the system houses 29 million active traveler profiles. For some corporations, the days of miniscule adoption of self-booking tools are not over, but officials said GetThere has enjoyed 20 percent growth in corporate trips booked for five straight years. Self-booking system salespeople probably still think of the phone as a major competitor, but more than ever that's an issue for non-U.S. markets.

Even overseas, GetThere is seeing notable pickup. Bookings in the Europe, Middle East and Africa region grew 71 percent last year over 2004, and the system now handles 65,000 transactions a month there, officials said. In Latin America, bookings rose 31 percent year-over-year in 2005.

"A huge number of corporate travelers use our technology, and we believe there is a lot of opportunity to continue the strong growth rates we saw last year," said Sabre Holdings Corporate Solutions president Ellen Keszler in a Friday telephone interview. "It's driven by a combination of our current customers growing transaction volume as they grow adoption, as well as the addition of new customers, whether sold by us or through our distributor program."

Keszler said GetThere in 2005 added 65 travel agencies to its distributor reseller program, including 20 in Latin America, for a current total of 83. She mentioned American Express and TQ3Navigant as large distributors, and said GetThere recently "signed another mega agency; you'll see announcement on that soon."

~ Jay Campbell