AS Cendant’s Travelport enters the region (see story above), e-Travel, Amadeus’ e-commerce unit, has signed up its first corporation in Asia-Pacific, Woodside Energy, an Australian resources company, to adopt its SAP (systems, applications and products in data processing) solution.

Woodside’s business services manager logistics, Mr Russell Moyle, said: “As high consumers of business travel, Woodside wanted a fully-integrated travel management solution that allowed staff to easily plan and book their travel while ensuring company travel policy was adhered to,” adding it was already seeing the benefits of this new solution.

Amadeus claims that by facilitating bookings online, the solution can save corporations up to 60 per cent of the traditional cost of processing travel bookings, and a further 10 to 15 per cent reduction in the cost of travel through the implementation of corporate travel policies and the selection of preferred suppliers.

Amadeus Asia Pacific president, Mr David Brett, said: “Corporations in the region are now demanding a new standard in complete travel management solutions. These next generation solutions, like SAP, must ensure policy compliance, reduce costs and integrate seamlessly with the existing software systems.”

Mr Brett told BTN Asia-Pacific no other programme currently could compete with SAP, which he said was a complete and integrated solution that enabled corporations to manage and streamline the travel process from the initial request, through to bookings, approval, expenses and reporting.

“Travelport offers policy and profile management for employee online bookings, but has no travel expense functionality allowing employees to submit travel expenses, as well as being unable to integrate with a corporation’s ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system. Additionally, Travelport does not offer web fares, and requires considerable customisation to be implemented for each new client,” he added.