Travelport continues international expansion with first Asia Pacific customer

Travelport Corporate Solutions a leading provider of corporate travel management solutions and a subsidiary of Cendant Corp. today announced that Travelforce Pty Ltd has become its first Travel Management customer in the Asia Pacific region.

Following Travelport's successful debut in the US last August, and in the UK last October, this new agreement signals Travelport's continuing expansion into the major business travel markets around the world.

One of Travelforce's largest clients, Aon Risk Services Australia Limited (Aon), will be the first of its customers to utilise Travelport to arrange and book corporate travel online for its 700 travelling employees. Aon is one of  Australia's leading providers of broking and consulting services for risk management, insurance transactions, reinsurance, employee benefits and superannuation.

Travelport's online booking tool gives corporate travel managers unprecedented control and flexibility over travel programmes and a greater ability to influence policy adherence in the online environment while offering travellers an easy-to-use online system for arranging travel. Travelport is specifically designed to meet the needs of business travellers, travel coordinators and the travel management company. It is easily configurable into existing corporate systems.

Travelport's broad functionality allows corporations to efficiently manage profile synchronization to ensure traveller data are accessible across different databases, enhance policy enforcement, and integrate pre-trip notification, web fares, fulfillment services, Premium Economy booking and multi-class itineraries. Leveraging the strengths of Galileo as a global distribution services (GDS) provider, Travelport has helped corporations reduce overall travel management costs by up to 40%. 

More than 275 of the world's leading companies are using Travelport. The BTTB Sydney 2004 Conference March 23 and 24 marks the official launch of Travelport in Australia and New Zealand. Galileo will be working closely with travel management companies when offering Travelport to corporations in these markets and elsewhere in the Asia Pacific region.

"We are delighted to launch Travelport in the Asia Pacific and warmly welcome the decision of Travelforce and Aon to take advantage of this unique and customizable business travel solution," said John Guscic, Vice President South Pacific. 

"We have carefully tailored Travelport to meet the needs of the Australia and New Zealand markets. The timing is right to introduce an integrated and flexible solution in the Asia Pacific's evolving corporate travel marketplace. As companies continue to look for ways to reduce costs and assume more direct control over large cost centers, such as corporate travel - the second largest controllable expense within an organisation - we will continue to see demand in this region for cost effective managed programs increase." 

Travelforce CEO, Andrew Ross, said that the company is always keen  to embrace the latest technologies to create savings for clients.

"We are excited to be first to market in this region with the Travelport solution. It is a world-leading web-based system which will be able to drive down transaction costs by up to 40% for our clients.

"We will deploy Travelport on our website via our new Ascent Client Management System under the branding 'Self Service'."

Travelport makes its debut in Australia and New Zealand with new features that include Advanced Policy™, a second-generation travel policy adherence tool that leads the industry. Advanced Policy allows corporations to implement very detailed business rules to search more effectively, enforce policy more creatively and manage travellers better. Travelport is the only online corporate booking tool offering this capability.

"We are especially excited about our Advanced Policy capability," said Kurt Knackstedt, Director of Product Management and Marketing (Asia Pacific). "This powerful element of the overall solution - by far the most advanced in the industry - offers Travelport users a unique benefit. We use dynamic rule settings - a system that obeys policy rules but can do a little bit extra for you. It's like policy software with built-in common sense. So the system will search for an airline specified by the travel manager. But it will go back a second time and interpret the policy to deliver the best fare from available inventory, while also capturing and inserting trip-specific benchmark data. Our competitors only have 1st generation travel policy - they are missing dynamic rule settings."