February 05, 2009 - GetThere and IBM on Wednesday announced plans to unveil an integrated booking and expense product during the second quarter. The companies called it the "first technology integration with an online corporate travel provider" for IBM's Global Expense Reporting Solutions.
They said the integration would offer "increased visibility into 'booked' versus 'actually spent' data, letting corporations track and trend critical items, including reports of canceled trips, hotel properties honoring negotiated rates [and] ancillary fees charged by airlines."
Like other online booking providers, GetThere for many years has provided clients with booking data that they integrate with expense tools, such as IBM's, officials said. During the past three years, however, the duo's primary common competitor,
Concur, has heavily marketed another level of booking-expense integration that its executives say consolidates the functions into one piece of software and produces a fuller picture of spending.
Concur's alignment late last year with American Express appeared to further exploit GetThere's lack of an expense tool and IBM's lack of a booking solution. [Amex at the time had longstanding partnerships with both GetThere and IBM; the latter was terminated.]
GetThere president Chris Kroeger offered comments suggesting the new GetThere-IBM solution would be competitive with Concur's integrated product. "There's a continuum of integration that at one end is that simple data exchange, which has benefits but also has limitations," said Kroeger during a Wednesday interview at a meeting of the Society of Government Travel Professionals in Alexandria, Va. "On the other end is the more deeply intertwined integration. You have that opportunity for the more holistic view with a complete picture of all booking sources, whether online or offline. You are doing the reconciliation in what was booked on the front end versus what hits the credit card and the expense [report]. And you're able to look at booked versus actual and manage accordingly in terms of changes to policy or whatever it might be. Some customers want that simple data exchange; increasingly, customers want deeper integration and interoperability."
Kroeger said the integration incorporates data for passenger name records that were altered by an agent in the global distribution system after the booking is initially made by a traveler in GetThere. "We can do what's called a 'PNR acquire,' and from there the data continues, if you will, to feed into the end-to-end expense and reconciliation process," he said. "It's a much deeper technical integration of booking, expense and reconciliation, and the data optics that go with that."
Concur executive vice president for technology Tom DePasquale last week called his firm's proprietary technology a "reader" that "synchronizes the agency with the expense tool. Nothing would be more worthless than taking online bookings and shoving them into an expense report where they are no longer accurate because the booking was voided, canceled or changed. The last thing we want to do is put a false receipt into the expense report and then reimburse. We have hundreds of thousands of lines of code to prevent that."
According to DePasquale, the reader takes in mid- and back-office data, as well as online booking information. "Really what we capture in the online booking process is, 'Did they make the right choice?' And if they didn't, we tattle on them and we keep that tattle going on in the expense report," he said. "We do not integrate online bookings to Concur Expense. We integrate all bookings to Concur Expense and all changes to those bookings. It's incredibly complex technology that Concur and [previously] Outtask have spent over seven years developing. [It cost] untold tens of millions of dollars to develop. And no one else has even come to the game, let alone stepped to the plate."
Kroeger said the development work shared between GetThere and IBM is "almost complete. We have been working on it for the past few months. We each had work to do, and each just made commitments to the partnership to do the work we needed to get that integration in place." He declined to provide a dollar amount for the investments. Both firms will sell the joint product to, most likely, midsize and large clients. GetThere also is offering it to travel management company resellers.
Meanwhile, Kroeger said GetThere and IBM are pursuing a pricing model that is decidedly different from
Concur's pricing structure for integrated booking and expense, which emphasizes transaction charges per expense report.
"Both of us came into development of the partnership with existing pricing models," he said. "As well, there were others in the marketplace who had established their pricing model, so we were looking at all those pieces. Customers have told us how they would like to see the pricing model; we concluded this is a trip-centric need, so we decided to have the offering be one all-in price around a trip rather than an expense report--a PNR-centric pricing model."
According to a prepared statement, IBM GERS director Raymond Curatolo called the deal a "foundation for IBM as we expand our service options for midsize and large managed programs." GetThere recently announced another deal for deeper integration with SAP, and the booking vendor also has a partnership with Databasics.
IBM said its expense tool is deployed in more than 60 countries and processes more than 20 million expense reports per year. GetThere books more than 10 million online business trips annually, the company said.
