July 24, 2000

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Travel Industry Eases Burdens On Business Customers

Road warriors can print boarding passes from home, buy tickets over their cell phones

By Cheryl Rosen

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he airline industry faces a unique problem when trying to communicate with its best customers: Business travelers always tend to be, well, traveling.

New technology introduced last week will make it easier for companies and their customers to stay in touch. Northwest Airlines lets travelers check in for flights and print out boarding passes from their PCs before they even leave home. Online marketplace GetThere Inc. purchased All Meetings, expanding to include both individual and group travel. And Sabre Holdings Corp.'s Business Travel Solutions system became the first to let business travelers buy airline tickets via their cell phones.

Northwest's new service, available first at Memphis International Airport, lets travelers avoid long check-in lines at the airport. "It's part of a suite of check-in tools that includes wearable wireless computers that agents can use to check in people while they're standing in line, and ATMlike kiosks where passengers can swipe credit cards to produce boarding passes," says John Parker, VP of information services. "It's the ultimate in self-service."

Northwest is working on cell-phone check-in as well and last week began handling "irregular operations" such as cancellations by providing a bank of cell phones that passengers can just pick up at the gate to rebook new flights. GetThere's meeting services, meanwhile, will automate the bookings needed to bring large business groups together.

"We're all looking for a product that ties our purchasing together, so we don't have to enter the data 50 times," says Cyndi Perper, director of corporate travel services at Colgate Palmolive Corp. in New York, which has 100 frequent travelers testing Sabre BTS and a travel tab that tops $25 million a year.

The ultimate goal is to feed all reservations into one system that automatically updates hotel and arrival lists for ground transportation whenever a change is made to an airline reservation, Perper says. "The more ways travelers can access and use these systems, the better."

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