[UPDATE, March 7, 2018: ETA Inc. has added support for travel coordinators, car bookings, multi-stop air trips and calendar integration. The app also now offers a value-versus-comfort view that takes into account seat products and on-time performance. After running a limited promotion with United Airlines, ETA is exploring more partnerships with travel supplier small business…
Carlson Wagonlit Travel is discontinuing the consumer-facing version of WorldMate, the popular itinerary app it bought in 2012 for reportedly $20 million. A company official said CWT would continue to support WorldMate’s email parsing API, which backs several similar apps and services including Sabre’s TripCase. “CWT is focused on its core business of providing the best end-to-end customer…
Price assurance has taken root in corporate travel. TripBam and Yapta, especially, have made serious inroads. Another airfare reshopping firm, FairFly also is building a business on travel price volatility. These specialists are compiling huge data repositories. For travel managers, this may represent newfound power. They can watch (and maybe influence) traveler booking behavior. In…
It’s hard to keep track of all the startups now addressing small or unmanaged business travel. They’re applying a number of concepts including rewards, texting, personalization and artificial intelligence. They promise a better user experience than existing corporate booking systems offer. Investors during the past two years have put millions into them. One already was acquired…
Thanks partly to rate assurance technology and data, some buyers now are thinking about setting fire to the lodging RFP process. Or, at least, subjecting it to a little controlled burning. According to 2014 GBTA Foundation research sponsored by Best Western, the hotel RFP process was taking between three and six months for more than…
As they work for advantage, clients, suppliers and those in between keep business travel management interesting. Changes to underlying and consumer-facing technology make it a dynamic business function. The personal and geopolitical elements of business travel offer points of note from the micro to macro levels. As one of our featured practitioners noted, this job is about economics, geography, psychology and then some….
[UPDATE: Booking.com in 2017 acquired Evature. Concur in 2016 bought Hipmunk.”] The next big thing excited travel technology enthusiasts when Concur in 2012 invested in Evature, provider of natural-language search capabilities. The technology hasn’t become, in PhoCusWright’s words at the time, a “game-changing travel innovation.” But there are signs it’s beginning to move from Gartner’s “peak…
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