2000: E-Commerce Sparks Managed Travel Imagination

BTN on Friday revealed the final stretch of our 2024 countdown of the biggest travel programs, according to U.S.-originating air spend. Amazon, for the fourth consecutive year landed at the top of the list. Travel programs, technology providers and travel management companies continue to look to the Amazon experience as a beacon of inspiration for “what travel could be,” but in the year 2000 the concept of e-commerce was just beginning to spark the imagination of the broader industry. 

What would it look like? Who do we target? How can it save us more money? 

Those were all questions the industry was eager to answer, and there was lots of experimentation going on. That said, we can identify some overarching trends—some lasting and some not. And for those that were not, it may be a case of how the imagination moved faster than technological capabilities, but that initial vision has not been lost.  

I’ll review some of those trends in just a sec. Before that, I want to address some of the travel supplier dynamics in play in the market to set the stage. 

Buyers began to gain some leverage in airline negotiations in 2000. That didn’t look like it was going to be the case early in the year as fuel costs rose and airlines tacked some hefty surcharges on top of fares. Over the course of the year, airlines also would initiate six overall fare hikes, but to some extent those were counteracted by intense competition at both the hub and route level, domestically, and there was some evident instability in carriers like US Airways, which embarked on a merger with United, which ultimately was denied by the Department of Justice in July 2001. Low-cost carriers like Spirit, Frontier and—certainly—Southwest were gaining higher profile among the corporate travel set, taking more than edge-case volume away from mainline carriers. An influx of competition from European airlines going after U.S.-based corporate business also came into play for lucrative transatlantic business. Airline alliances formed and firmed up: SkyTeam formed in June 2000, Star Alliance added several new members in 2000 and OneWorld was just one year into its operations. The managed travel industry saw it’s first global alliance contracts—and they were groundbreaking.

On the hotel front, buyers were at the end of their negotiating ropes. Hotels were hopping on the yield management train, with demand for rooms outstripping supply. According to STR, average daily rates in 2000 rose 8.4 percent. According to buyers BTN talked to, hotels had not paid particular attention to their corporate rate loading, and buyers were incensed with the results. Marriott sales executive at the time Bruce Wolff went so far as to “guarantee” accurate rate loading for the 2001 negotiating season and promised compensation to corporate clients if it didn’t happen. Aside from that frustration, however, buyers were grappling with a narrowing definition of last room availability just when they realized they needed such a lever most. Hotels began fencing which rooms LRA could apply to and adding steep premiums to agreements that secured the guarantee. They introduced the concept of “yieldable” rates, which grouped rooms into pricing tiers (somewhat independently of room type) and offered negotiations at those rate types, but availability would be limited. Travelers could book at a higher rate tier if they wanted to stay at the corporate preferred property.

By the end of the year, BTN ran a front page story with the headline “Hotels Want Less,” with the idea that the market was trending away from soliciting corporate travel volume—sending travel buyers, who may have spent the previous year ruthlessly rationalizing their supply base to achieve volume discounts, now seeking additional partners to feather out that same volume. Johnson & Johnson took the hammer approach with its large market program demanding LRA from every hotel that participated in the program. With forced promises like this, was a coincidence that owner/operator companies suddenly wanted to be more involved in the decision-making around corporate deals? The Sept. 2000 article in BTN didn’t actually state that, but with the dynamics in play, you have to wonder. 

OK—let’s get to those tech trends. There really were a lot of them, and I hope I can do a few some justice here. And there's one thing really important to note: 2000 was the year "I found it cheaper online" became the bane of travel managers everywhere.

• Corporate Fares on Consumer Sites—Airlines, in particular, begin to look at the Southwest consumer site model and try to figure out how they can thread the needle to provide corporate rates on their snazzy new e-commerce websites. Southwest did not negotiate corporate rates at the time, despite the fact that it began to go after corporate business in true earnest in 2000, so the website was a cleaner option. Corporate rates were a tricky question that Air Canada’s effort revealed would really need to start with a traveler profile. This is a time before “frequent flyer” programs had been transformed into today’s data rich “loyalty programs” that everyone joins. There were corporate client identifier codes in play to access negotiated rates on consumer sites. Alaska was first out of the gate on this in late 1999, Delta and Northwest both launched the capability fairly early in 2000. Air Canada worked on the idea as well and there were a host of other airlines working on—and launching—this capability. United may have been the exception to the rule with bringing corporate rates to consumer sites, with an interesting twist that it would limit its consumer site pitch to small and midsize companies that don't necessarily have negotiated contracts. It looked like a prescient move that we see companies like Marriott exploring today in products like Business Access with the advantage of hindsight, plus more advanced tech.
  
  Hotels got into this game as well, and we’ll see soon enough that meetings, in particular, were ripe for meeting planning modules built into consumer websites.
  
  The pitfalls of booking direct on consumer sites then are likely the same as they are today: losing sight of the booking, communicating to travelers that they need to input the corporate code, getting service from a TMC partner. For all those reasons—and the relatively basic data collection, reporting and consolidation practices at that time—I can see how travel managers would have lost control of their programs fairly quickly.

• Direct Connects & Third-Party Marketplaces—One of the many alluring aspects of direct e-commerce was, of course, avoiding third-party distribution costs. Airlines continued to champ at the bit to free themselves from the GDS in 2000 also by pursuing one-off direct connections to different corporate travel marketplace concepts. Oracle’s E-Travel Marketplace was probably the most advanced and claimed 200 corporate customers, but it still didn’t have the breadth of content or suppliers available to service an enterprise corporate travel program. GetThere also had a direct-connect product in play, even Sabre BTS had plans afoot. I didn’t get the sense that the BTS product got off the ground before Sabre Acquired GetThere in September. After the acquisition, execs stated the strategy for the marketplace would not change, but a quick search for trade press mentions of GetThere Marketplace in 2001, turned up no results. If there’s a deeper story here, please feel free to get in touch with me. Some mysterious companies emerged briefly in BTN reporting as players in this space. Goldenware Travel Technologies was one that floated a third-party, XML-powered direct connect marketplace, between December 1999 and June 2000, but was never heard from again.

• Large Procurement Marketplace Systems—Bigger picture e-commerce sites for business purchasing also became more prominent on the scene in 2000. GE Capital and American Express separately launched larger procurement marketplaces that included travel. This was a continuation from 1999, when Concur launched Employee Desktop, which enabled purchasing for all types of business needs but did not yet include a travel module. In 2000, Concur launched Business Advantage for small and midsize companies and Oracle rolled out purchasing portal which CEO Larry Ellison said would soon include voice recognition for futuristic ordering. Even as GE Capital, American Express, and Oracle were launching their purchasing sites, the fates were brewing trouble for Concur’s, which missed its earnings targets considerably by August, at which point it sold off its purchasing portals, laid off 13 percent of its workforce, shifted away from its HR management technologies and decided to focus nearly exclusively on expense management in what we know now as a software-as-a-service model. It was a good move for them. I’ll have to catch up later on what became of the other procure systems that were in play at the time, but suffice to say, it doesn’t looks like these broad stroke marketplaces were the right choice for travel purchasing. I don’t see any major players in this space now.

I did see very clearly in my tour of the 2000 in business travel, however, new commercial models and business niches shaped by the burgeoning power of e-commerce and travel technologies. One obvious winner in this space was TRX, formerly called World Travel Technologies and spun off from World Travel Partners in 1997, came into its own in 2000. 

It did so by enabling a business structure that we see more of today—TMCs that provide the midoffice and quality control, data capture and reporting capability and other “invisible” services that have to exist behind a booking tool in order to fulfill travel orders. (We see it today for tools like TravelBank but BTN also wrote about a similar arrangement in a hugely innovative program at PwC, with traveler profile and booking fulfillment tech provided by Gant Travel.)

What began to emerge in a world of proliferating front-end booking technologies was the need for low-cost quality check and fulfillment capabilities. Partnering with its former parent company World Travel Partners, TRX created the rails for low-cost central fulfillment centers to back up these front-end reservation systems. WTP had provided such services to Expedia when Microsoft first rolled out that tool in 1997—and TRX was taking the mantle to extend that type of business. 

American Express chose TRX for its midoffice tech provider in the late summer of 2000, proving definitively that TRX was separated from its former WTP parent. Just two months later, Amex announced that it would create a new suite of products for online travel fulfillment. Called Business Travel Interactive Services, the service would compete with WTP to provide online reservation support with file finishing and ticketing. Structuring the market in this way not only opened more possibilities for TMCs fulfill the ticketing needs for third-party reservation technologies, it also allowed TMCs to work with multiple booking tool providers on the front end, according to the desire of the corporate, and still fulfill and service travel for that client company at a reduced cost.  

Concur, which faced financial straits in 2000 and saw its stock price drop from $30 to $3 during the course of that year, eventually would become the travel booking and expense reporting juggernaut that would acquire TRX in 2013. But it would have to purchase Cliqbook first, which it did in 2006, and build its integrated travel-expense universe. That's a story for another day. 

For now, enjoy this week’s timeline for the year 2000.

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Ford Motor Co. mandates compliance to preferred hotels, telling travelers they will not be reimbursed if they book outside the program. But the hotel market experiences significant compression, challenging travel managers with low availability and high rates. 

Year-end 1999 alliance reconfigurations leave travel buyers to re-evaluate the groups that work for them. 

Air Canada gained control of rival carrier Canadian Airlines and began operating it as a wholly owned subsidiary. 

Volkswagon takes sole ownershp of Europcar.

Business Travel Coalition rolls out the idea of group purchasing again, this time leveraging a website as a centralized purchasing tool for members.

PricewaterhouseCoopers and EDS launch separate web-based travel portals that form part of larger efforts to bring travel into a broad spectrum of business purchasing and procurement.

British Airways begins to offer global deals after a major restructure of its sales strategy, and gains such contracts with BP Amoco, Citigroup, IBM and PwC.  

Continental implements a $10 one-way fuel surcharge after jet fuel costs surge at year-end 1999. The charge is not included in quoted fares, but is outlined on tickets themselves.

EventSource-AA Link offers first meetings website-airline connection.

Alaska Airlines begins offering corporate fares on its consumer websites.

Delta and Northwest separately test the concept of building reservations systems that enables business travelers to access and book negotiated corporate rates on the carrier’s consumer website.

GE Capital and American Express separately launch web-based procurement marketplaces that include travel. GE has the advantage of its system GE Business Marketplace serving the needs of its own company, in which travel alone was $850 million in 1999. Amex called its product B2B Commerce Network.

A group of travel industry professionals led by Keith St. Clair as CEO rolls up eight midsize agencies into a company it called TraveLeaders.

British Airways eliminates agency commissions. 



AT&T headquarters debuts a Continental Airlines check-in kiosk as the carrier looks to install off-airport machines at client headquarters for e-ticketed domestic travelers. The kiosk allowed seat selection, frequent flyer account info and upgrades when available.

IBM extends the reach of hotel folio data solution by offering the capability to users of the company’s Expense Reporting Solutions. “Critical mass” for IBM at the time was 38 hotels participating in the e-folio program; IBM expected hundreds more to join in 2000.

Republic National Bank, under the travel program direction of Andy Menkes, debuts and extranet link directly to British Airways’ reservation system.

Southwest Airlines announces the capability to track corporate purchases made on its direct website.

Concur and Oracle push their product to B2B portals. Concur Business Advantage consolidates purchasing for small and midsize companies, negotiates discounts with suppliers and runs orders through Concur’s workflow and approval process. Oracle launches its purchasing portal on mobile platforms, partnering with Sabre on the mobile site for the travel booking interface. Oracle CEO Ellison says it will launch “within a few months” and will include voice recognition.

Hoteliers move to expand in-room internet connections, but plan to include surcharges for the privilege of using it—another item for that hotel folio data.

OpenTravel Alliance releases V1.0 of standardized, XML-based passenger profile information in a move that realizes an important milestone in pulling together a wide variety of industry players to agree on formats that “one day will be used for meatier stuff.”



Buyers look to push accountability to the hotel side, questioning the commitment from hotels to load proper rates into the GDS. Marriott exec Bruce Wolff said he would “guarantee” all rates negotiated in a timely manner would be loaded correctly or Marriott would compensate the corporate client.

US Airways announces plans to bring corporate rates to its consumer website, reliant on traveler profiles being set up with the carrier. It also promises immediate booking of meeting fares as well as direct settlement.

Hewlett Packard extends online booking companywide with GetThere. The company has an unconsolidated structure, with three agencies at the time.

Scandinavian Airline Systems begins testing a wireless booking system that enables bookings via mobile phones. It is in pilot phase with a handful of corporate customers, among whom 100 percent of their most frequent travelers use mobile phones.

The World Bank mandates long haul bookings with its preferred airlines in a move the reflects a growing culture of mandates among corporate travel programs.

Association of Corporate Travel Executives includes strategic meetings management for the first time among its education session roster.



Empire International car service company adds online reservation capability.

British Airways’ new e-commerce business-to-business division announces it will roll out two portals for corporate travel, the first will address the small and midsize market based on a GetThere booking engine and later a version for larger multinational corporate clients. The portals, in a unique move, allow corporate travelers to book any scheduled carrier, hotels and car rental company. 

American Airlines and United Airlines vie for market share in the Chicago market, and United begins to widen its lead in the city. Corporate buyers benefit from the rivalry with competitive prices and negotiating leverage. 

Carlson Wagonlit Travel, despite clients’ service misgivings, moves the majority to a network of five call centers and strategically distances itself from providing onsite services for corporate clients.  

Sabre BTS and Extensity integrate booking and expense systems in a partnership that bundles both the technology and the business relationship as customers look to “integrate the whole workflow process,” according to a Sabre exec. 

New agent functionality in GDSs—Amadeus, Galileo and Worldspan—looks to track and report on unused tickets. Sabre has already offered the functionality for a year to connected agents. Northwest additionally introduces an auto-cancel procedure for reservations that were made but not ticketed. The functionality automatically returns that seat to inventory. Worldspan is the only GDS to enable it, but NWA begins pressure campaign on other GDSs to similarly enable. 

“I found it cheaper online” begins to take a toll on travel programs. DuPont initiates a study to determine the depth of the issue, finding that in most cases of the “traveler convenient” choice, the program offers the better fare. Based strictly on lowest price, online fares sometimes came in cheaper. 

Corporate travel profiles come into focus as discrepancies among traveler profile holders—travel agency, GDS, the corporation itself—become clear. Without synchronizing those profiles, rolling out online booking tools can face stumbling blocks. 

US Airways looks to transatlantic expansion to pull itself out of financial troubles.

Internet startup Yatra goes live with what it calls “the first complete web-centered travel management solution for middle-market corporations.” The Minneapolis-based company uses Datalex’s BookSmart reservation engine. Its differentiator is a proprietary technology it calls “Cognizer” that meshes 50 factors of policy and personal preference at the time of booking. 

KLM abandons its Alitalia alliance; Northwest, the third entity in the alliance, continues on with KLM. 



United Airlines proposes a merger with US Airways, launching a consolidation speculation across other airlines such as American with Delta or American with Northwest. The $4.3 billion proposed merger immediately met with Department of Justice antitrust issues and ultimately fell through in Summer 2001.

Department of Transportation approves a controversial IATA-proposed corporate ID system that appends a global client identifier to bookings made my corporate travelers. The code would enable visibility—to all carriers—into corporate travel patterns and volumes. It’s a voluntary system, but buyers fear airlines will use financial incentives to get buy-in and potentially compromise corporate privacy and leverage. 

GetThere and E-Travel separately expand efforts to create direct connections to suppliers and bypass the GDS. While questioning the value of one-off connections, Sabre floats ideas about lowering distribution costs to suppliers. 

American Express debuts a corporate booking tool called Corporate Travel Online, a modified version of GetThere’s Global Manager, after eight months of development. The company does little to enhance its AXI product designed with Microsoft a few years earlier. 

Delta, Air France, Aeromexico and Korean Airlines unveiled the Skyteam alliance.

Choice Hotels International, Hilton Hotels and Marriott International within a week of each other announce expansion of internet availability in guest rooms and lobby areas; travel managers are motivated to make internet access a priority for their hotel programs.

Goldware Travel Technologies announces plan to launch a direct connect travel marketplace at www.flightlookup.com via on an XML-based price feed that allows airlines to “begin the process of differentiation.” American and Continental reportedly are working closely with the Goldenware. However, BTN never reports on or quotes Goldenware after this announcement. 



Starwood Hotels & Resorts introduces Folio Express, giving corporates access to item-level hotel folio data. IBM, Ford and Seagrams  & Sons all have made use of the technology and Starwood expects 200 of its 780 properties will offer the service by Aug. 1.  

TRX Technology Services and GetThere lean into the idea of corporate travelers finding better rates on direct supplier or aggregator websites and begin to work on integrating web fares into their search results. Other booking tools like Sabre BTS and Worldspan TripManager “plan to do it” too. 

GetThere purchases AllMeetings.com for $25 million; the tool selects cost-effective hotels and destinations based on the departure points of meeting attendees. 

Chartwell and Ford Motor Co. buy Carey International and take it private again in a $300 million transaction. 

World Travel Partners works in conjunction with TRX Technology Services to provide low-cost fulfillment of reservations made through corporate online booking for its first customers Sprint and Sabre BTS. It is modeled on the services that TRX provides on the consumer side to Expedia, Continental, US Airways and Orbitz.



Continental requires corporate accounts to electronically feed booking data to the Prism Group as part of the carrier’s Corporate Insight program. More than 250 clients already were using the program. 

Amex introduces a technology enhancement that allows corporate clients to automatically bill travel agency transaction fees back to the division or cost center associated with the traveler. The product “stresses to travelers the cost of the agency service.” Fee Allocator is launched to 41 companies

Concur stock falls to $3 after trading at a high of $30 earlier in the year; the company lays of 13 percent of workers and renews focus on the core expense reporting software, moving away from the HR side and dropping the procurement marketplace altogether. It shifts to an “ASP” model, which eventually becomes known as SaaS.



Sabre buys GetThere for $757 million. The acquisition sparks some Sabre BTS and GetThere customers to look elsewhere for online booking; the GDS also lays off 1,200 workers in an efficiency initiative. 

Worldspan invests $11 million in Datalex, the web engine for American and Delta airlines.

Johnson & Johnson executes hotel program that requires last room availability from all participating hotels in an overall market facing low inventory.

Hotel owner and operator companies get more active in the hotel negotiations process, not content to leave the job to national sales organizations at the brand level. 

After a summer of disruptions that numbered in the thousands each month, United offers to compensate corporate clients with waived change fees and an additional 2 percent discount off their corporate rates. 

Major hotel companies like Carlson Hospitality and Starwood Hotels & Resorts begin featuring multiple hotel brands at a single site, highlighting multi-brand experiences and their appeal to corporate clients.

American goes with direct connect links on GetThere and E-Travel

American Express selects TRX for mid-office technology, emphasizing TRX’s independence from its former parent company World Travel Partners.  



Hoteliers, fighting against limited availability, begin fencing the parameters of last room availability and introduce minimum length of stay requirements. Buyers contend hotels are building restrictions into the GDS making it impossible to book rooms. 

ITA Software, the developer of the highly touted fare shopping engine that powers Orbitz booking site, will offer its own booking tool. Meanwhile, corporate travelers “are not waiting” and have hit up Orbitz CEO Jeff Katz on the idea that Orbitz could serve managed travel, for which he says he has “no good answer.” Orbitz for Business launches in 2002. 

Woodside Travel Trust becomes Radius; the 30-year-old consortium tightens member requirements, including holding them to higher service standards, data consolidation and delivery and branding. 

Amex, in a move to compete with WTP, introduces a new suite of products called Business Travel Interactive Services that includes online travel fulfillment for corporations and travel technology providers. 

Marriott offers buyers “yieldable” rates as an alternative to last room availability. The solution allows hotels to negotiate a low rate in the contract, but fence that rate to a limited number of rooms, after which the traveler pays a higher rate or “finds another hotel that has an available reservation,” said a Marriott sales exec. 

Whale Media projects that in early 2001 it will launch what sounds like a “Priceline” style bidding website for small and midsize companies wherein the corporate sets up its own program profile and then is able to request bids from hotels to compete for room nights for individual traveler bookings.  



United offers airlines software to interline with e-tickets; the airlines first used the tech to interline with Star Alliance partner Air Canada. With the new offering, it is opening to opportunity to more carriers, including direct competitors.

United launches e-commerce initiative United NewVentures, which for the corporate market will focus on small and midsize companies. “For large corporations,” the carrier said, “we see our role as influencing … online booking systems, such as GetThere.”

Financially embattled Lucent Technologies sold its corporate travel department to business service provider Alliente Inc., which then would service Lucent on an outsource model and likely will service other travel programs.  

PlanSoft launches Meeting Management Solutions, Carlson Marketing Group launches MeetingsLogic and GetThere launches DirectMeetings (from its previous acquisition of AllMeetings.com), signaling a new phase in meetings management tech. For reference, Cvent launched as a startup in Sept. 1999.



Continental Airlines and Northwest settle with U.S. Department of Justice, with NWA selling its controlling stake in Continental, but the two did renew their alliance through 2025 (an agreement which became moot when Delta acquired NWA in 2008).

Hotel negotiations prove unwieldy in a tight market. Additionally, non-standard addendums caused consternation among hoteliers as did the RFP outreach to local properties as buyers made efforts to do the best deals outside the national sales offices.  

Hotels, in a reversal of established travel management tenets, were calling on buyers to negotiate for fewer room nights as they held back on corporate availability in preference of higher yielding leisure travel.  

American Express introduces a dedicated meetings card. 

Carlson Wagonlit Travel takes 14 percent equity in KDS and has signed a non-exclusive agreement to distribute the KDS Wave booking tool.

As IBM pushed its own technology to facilitate e-folio capture, it also forged extranet direct links with American Airlines, Delta Air Lines and others, consolidated data and even negotiated merchant fees it pays to card vendors. But it also rolled out an internally developed expense system—a customized version of its publicly available Expense Reporting Solution.

Kevin Maguire leads a group of six midsize travel programs in a combined hotel RFP in an effort to yield better rates and increasingly elusive inclusions like last room availability. 


Kroger holds an online auction for its car rental program; buyer Barbara Hornback projects auctions “will be a big part of how travel is going to be purchased.”

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Elizabeth West is the editorial director of the BTN Group. She has reported on the business travel and meetings industries for 24 years. Beth was editor-in-chief of Meeting News from 2006 to 2008 and director of content solutions for ProMedia Travel from 2008 to 2011, when ProMedia was acquired by Northstar Travel Media and merged with BTN. She became editor-in-chief of BTN in 2015 and editorial director of the BTN Group in 2019. 

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