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GetThere on track for continental rail bookings
Corporate online travel booking system GetThere is to offer a continental European rail booking capability through French national rail operator SNCF.
It means that SNCF services are available for GetThere customers in France, the UK, the Benelux region and other regions in which SNCF subsidiary Rail Europe has distribution agreements.
GetThere users can book travel on French domestic routes, Eurostar, Thalys and Lyria. Corporations benefit from associated corporate travel promotional programmes such as European rail discount cards and frequent traveller programmes.
GetThere is also developing a ‘multi-modal’ display for customers for 2006. This will put full-service airlines, no-frills carriers and rail operators on the same booking screen for all relevant trips, such as Nice-Strasbourg or London-Paris.
Domestic UK rail travel has been bookable in GetThere through an alliance with thetrainline.com. But SNCF’s pan-European route network now makes a wide selection of continental rail journeys bookable in the system.
Floyd Widener, vice president of GetThere and corporate travel at Sabre Travel Network, said: “Continental European rail capability was an important piece of the product jig-saw. The requirement for an ever-growing range of bookable content in corporate self-booking tools points to the remarkable success of these products.”
GetThere said European customers were booking more than 60,000 trips a month towards the end of the third quarter of the year – a 65% increase from the same period in 2004. Growth comes from greater use of the system among existing corporate customers, white-label deals with travel management companies, and greater acceptance of the self-booking concept throughout Europe – particularly in France and Germany.
Report by Phil Davies
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