Expedia Turns To Business Intelligence To Boost Business Travel

Expedia Inc. took another step toward building its corporate travel-management offerings Tuesday when it said it would start using business-intelligence software to generate detailed reports to its business-travel clients.

The deployment of Business Objects SA's Enterprise 6 business-intelligence suite is the latest move by Expedia to expand its foothold in the increasingly competitive corporate-travel market. The travel site launched its business-travel unit after the July 2002 acquisition of Metropolitan Travel Inc. and has seen steady adoption. The company now provides travel services to more than 1,100 companies and has been named the preferred travel vendor by organizations such as Harvard University, Onyx, Safeco, and Salesforce.com. Last month, it expanded its offerings overseas with its acquisition of Engencia, an online corporate-travel-management firm with presence in Belgium, France, and the United Kingdom.

Expedia initially will roll out the Business Objects software to the corporate-travel division so company representatives can generate reports for their clients. The software will access data from Expedia's Microsoft SQL Server data warehouse and then will generate reports presenting complete summaries of Expedia's business with individual corporate-travel clients. Eventually, Expedia plans to deploy Business Objects for companywide reporting.