GetThere Partners For Fulfillment

<B>GetThere Partners For Fulfillment</B>
<I>Teaming online with TQ3 Maritz And Itravel</I>

By Jay Campbell

While trying to avoid alienating travel management companies with which it is closely aligned, such as American Express, GetThere has partnered on a nonexclusive basis with TQ3 Maritz Travel Solutions and Kansas City-based Itravel to offer clients low-cost alternatives for the fulfillment of online transactions.

The two partners are the first winners in a selection process that is expected to produce about half a dozen providers that the GetThere unit will offer to clients as best-in-breed online fulfillment shops.

For a unit of Sabre, the development is a sticky one in the ever-evolving relationships between travel booking/global distribution system vendors and travel management companies. The outcome appears to give an advantage to agencies that have incorporated low-cost fulfillment technologies into dedicated centers.

In that environment, emerging units of American Express, SatoTravel, WorldTravel BTI and others including Itravel and Maritz are employing a number of technologies that offer corporate travel managers tools to influence traveler behavior with an eye on both costs and service. Many of those tools are provided by TRX Inc., which recently expanded its relatively veteran fulfillment services to Central Europe.

"GetThere has always been set up to work with all the travel agencies and GDSs, but there's a distinction between that and a formal arrangement, although this is not meant to anoint specific agencies or select exclusive providers," said Tom Wilkinson, GetThere senior director of fulfillment services. "We plan to match customers with travel management companies that support the philosophy in efficiency and pricing." To that end, he said, "We think an online transaction should be no more than one-third the cost of a full-service transaction."

Describing the initiative at a conference in February, Wilkinson indicated that some agencies believe "it doesn't cost less to book online" and that they say, "there are issues preventing the savings." But the wave of corporate acceptance of self-booking technology has crashed home over the past year for travel management companies that now see their fastest-growing business coming from low-cost fulfillment centers. Agencies are beginning to get over the largest challenges, most of which reside around moving from manual processes to automation. Now, corporate fulfillment centers are quoting fees of under $20, with a long-term target of $10.

"How can you do fulfillment so much less expensively?" asked Mike Tenholder, vice president of alternative distribution at TQ3 Maritz Travel Solutions (BTN, Feb. 26). "It's the productivity level coming out of there."

Maritz's ECom service center pays its customer service reps roughly the same as traditional agents, even though they handle 10 times as many reservations a day. For American Express, productivity has gained four-fold.

Under $20 is below cost, said Steve Reynolds, chief technology officer at TRX. "You have to do it below cost; you're not going to be profitable from day one. Everybody's banking on scale, so as adoption picks up, the scale should make these prices make sense." He added that the megas are in a good position because of their large account bases: "I don't see how a small one could survive, unless it was a niche."

"It's very difficult to get actual costs down because you underestimate the amount of customer support you need," said Mary Ellen Humphrey, general manager for corporate fulfillment services at WorldTravel BTI. "We think the reality is around $19 for now, and it will all depend on how much the corporation wants to give up, like the consulting services that come with a managed travel account or the hotel programs."

Managing the costs down to a point of profitability takes a lot of experimentation, and the players involved already have learned a number of lessons and implemented a number of better practices. The construction of the booking engine itself plays a role in how automated the entire transaction can be.

"We find the booking engine is extremely important in how it creates the reservation, because that dictates whether we have to do anything for it," said Reynolds. "Every company needs different things, they have different legacy systems, different negotiated fares, etc., and if anything requires manual intervention, the costs go up rapidly."

TRX, which began online fulfillment on the leisure side in 1996, provides TQ3 Maritz with its EnCoRRe suite of mid-office products.

"It's a matter of blending the technologies," said TQ3 Maritz's Tenholder. "For example, GetThere or Sabre would not work the same with CoRRe as would ResAssist on Sabre or Worldspan," said Tenholder. "So we provide a lot of feedback to the vendors and say, 'It'd be nice if you can do so and so' to make our and their lives easier."

WorldTravel's Humphrey told a similar story: "With each vendor, the differences make the transaction more intensive. For example, with Sabre BTS, pull-down menus prompt the traveler or travel arranger to make specific requests, whereas GetThere gives them a lot of opportunity to write in manual text, which triggers a manual process."

GetThere executives said they work with travel agencies and corporate clients to construct passenger name records in the appropriate format.

While they have automated such mid-office needs as split ticketing, Humphrey said it is in the area of support systems where her division most differs from the traditional agency set-up. There, products called Messagepartner, Scholar and Agent Partner are helping to bring buyers tools that help them increase usage.

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Pushing E-Mail Usage</B>

Scholar is a database of frequently asked questions and Agent Partner is a database that houses a user's contact history, including such data as what a given call or e-mail was about and how long it took to resolve. Humphrey's Corporate Fulfillment Service division then can offer clients a better view of who and what is driving costs since, for example, e-mails are about half the price of phone calls.

"Travel managers can find out why their people are calling us, and maybe discuss which issues should require a phone call and for which ones travelers should use e-mail," Humphrey said. "Companies with a tight policy might even say, 'You will not call' for such and such issue."

Messagepartner, meanwhile, automatically routes e-mail support questions to the appropriate bucket, where they are sufficient, particularly for such things as forgotten passwords.

CFS divides its services into technical support and navigational support. The former encompasses the features and routines of a booking tool and the latter includes questions that might be asked of a traditional travel agent. Clients can choose to buy either or both kinds of support. Humphrey joked that Sabre, which is a CFS client, opts out of technical support for Sabre BTS: "They think they can provide better technical support on their own product than we can." These tools have helped CFS reduce calls-per-transaction from three to 0.6. If the technical challenge is too great, buyers and their vendors seek ways to change the process.

Rich Miller, vice president and general manager of the interactive travel group at American Express, suggested that, for example, if last room availability is becoming a labor-intensive exception to the typical hotel booking "because it's a low-cost fulfillment option, you may want to forego that in the interactive channel."

The growth of self-service in general also will help to improve employee productivity, particularly with the automation of such services as exchanges and refunds. Humphrey hopes to make such tools available next year.

As sources said, technology isn't everything.

"You have to use the automation intelligently," said GetThere's Peter Harrison, who heads the company's adoption consulting unit. "For example, a manual quality control check is important. You can't turn your entire corporate travel program over to a robot.