Flight Centre Travel Group acquired WhereTo, a travel booking software provider used by businesses including Walmart.
The parties didn’t disclose terms of the deal, which closed in June.
Formerly called WhereFor, WhereTo of late styled itself as a challenger to SAP Concur on the large end of the market. It started as a consumer travel booking software developer but pivoted four years ago when Walmart expressed interest. However, Flight Centre sees it as most applicable for small and medium-sized clients including those served by its Corporate Traveler brand. It could also be useful to Flight Centre’s leisure travel businesses.
During a phone interview last week, Flight Centre Travel Group chief experience officer John Morhous talked about being opportunistic in a challenging market.
“We went through a very public capitalization process to secure the company’s long-term future,” he said. “Then we took this as an opportunity to acquire some good technology at a good price point. It’s a full acquisition, which is a big deal for us because we’ll have complete control of the platform.”
Australia-based Flight Centre in April raised 700 million Australian dollars ($419 million) through a combination of a fully underwritten placement, institutional entitlement offer and retail entitlement offer.
The travel conglomerate during the last few years acquired parts of several travel tech developers, including 30SecondsToFly, Shep, Upside and, in March, Dubai-based content aggregator TPConnects.
John Morhous, chief experience officer at Flight Centre Travel Group
Fully owning the WhereTo platform, Morhous said, should be especially helpful at a time when business travelers need more information about their trips than ever. “The traveler experience is a huge deal right now, specifically with Covid,” he said. “Before it was all about low price, low fare, etc. Now it’s about duty of care, safety, confidence and trust, so it’s important to have as much control and visibility as possible in the workflow.”
The deal also supports Flight Centre’s continuity strategy with regard to airline distribution. WhereTo integrates with Travelport’s Apollo GDS, whereas Flight Centre uses multiple GDSs globally. Morhous wants to connect WhereTo with TPConnects to access fares and inventory from multiple sources including the GDSs.
“We’re leveraging the ability to pick and choose how to get content,” said Morhous. “It’s a new way.”
He referenced contract issues between Lufthansa and Sabre and Southwest and Sabre, as well as Air Canada’s migration from a direct connect strategy to one that emphasizes the ATPCO NDC Exchange.
“On the distribution side, it’s very challenging right now,” said Morhous. “There’s a lot of fragmentation that is continuing to happen. We’re making investments on back-end aggregation to make it easier for consultants and online tools to access content.”
Regarding the larger end of the market served by FCM Travel Solutions, Morhous said he expected no change in the company’s support of SAP Concur, Serko and the like.
Walmart officials could not be reached for a comment on whether the huge retailer would continue using WhereTo.
“We’d love to keep them, but this is not an attempt to gain customers,” said Morhous. “It’s a tech investment for us.”
WhereTo has about 25 employees. Morhous said almost all would stay on.
According to a written statement from WhereTo founder Ryan Wenger, “The strength of WhereTo had always been its weakness — our decision to target the enterprise first. We built the most robust, secure and configurable booking tool in the industry but faced sales cycles that are tough for a startup to weather. The pandemic and lockdown shortened our runway further, but also opened up the clouds to an opportunity we had never considered. Flight Centre is renowned for its service and people but now they also possess top booking technology and engineering power. One month in, we could not be happier with their culture and are well aligned with their ambitious vision. Big things are coming.”
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