Flight Centre Travel Group has acquired WhereTo, a San
Francisco-based enterprise travel platform and technology company.
Terms of the deal have not been disclosed.
WhereTo uses artificial intelligence to recommend to
employees hotels, flights and ground transportation that are within the company’s
travel policy and that take into account things such as traffic conditions, travel deals
and personal preferences. The company says its customers, ranging from “global
companies with subsidiaries in 28 countries to tech companies with 28 employees,”
save an average of 30% on their travel expenditures.
“Flight Centre’s acquisition of WhereTo will serve multiple
purposes within our businesses, in addition to fortifying the continued growth
of the already successful WhereTo portfolio with our global resources and
footprint.” says Charlene Leiss, president of Flight Centre Travel Group in the
Americas.
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“Our continued investments in booking technology, content
aggregation, AI and mobile services provide our corporate customers with
best‐in‐class technology tools to help them stay ahead of the rapidly evolving
corporate travel landscape. We are delighted to come together with WhereTo
during this unprecedented time to make a significant advancement in our
technology capability, which will allow us to emerge from the crisis in an
incredibly powerful way.”
Flight Centre says it will integrate WhereTo into products
and services in both its Corporate Traveler and FCM Travel Solutions brands,
and that it is “eager to explore the potential application of WhereTo’s leisure
offering, WhereFor,” which surfaces the best destinations and options based on
the travelers’ budget.
“The need to provide our customers with an advanced digital
platform that accentuates the blended service model we offer is further
heightened with the COVID‐19 pandemic,” says John Morhous, Flight Centre’s
chief experience officer.
“We look forward to leveraging the WhereTo technology within
our existing products to help expose the complex duty of care requirements
we’ll be facing as global travel restrictions are lifted, in line with the
‘design and control’ of user experiences which underpin the strategies of our
two largest brands.”