Expedia Turns To Business Intelligence To Boost Business Travel 2Expedia Turns To Business Intelligence To Boost Business Travel 2

Expedia Inc. took an incremental step toward building its corporate travel-management offerings Tuesday when it said it would start using business-intelligence software to augment customized reports it provides to its business-travel clients using its own proprietary software.

The deployment of Business Objects SA's Enterprise 6 business-intelligence suite will let Expedia inject additional detail into its corporate-travel reports, which represent an important service in the increasingly competitive business-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 is rolling 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 provide details of Expedia's business with individual corporate-travel clients not previously provided by the company's proprietary software. Company officials declined to comment on the additional details the software will provide, but a spokesman says Expedia is using the Business Objects software in other parts of its business as well.