HOLLYWOOD, Fla.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Fundamentally changing the way buyers and sellers interact, Rearden Commerce, creator of the Deem™ ecommerce platform, today unveiled web-based collaboration and relevance functionality aimed at transforming the way people plan travel. Colleagues planning a business trip, an administrative assistant organizing a trip for the team, a travel manager tasked with optimizing travel expenses, or friends planning a vacation will all benefit from the Deem Travel ability to surface personalized travel options and enable travelers to collect, organize, collaborate and purchase a trip that best fits their collective needs.
“Travel planning today is a fractured experience for individuals as well as for groups. There are too many emails, too many phone calls, too many web sites, too much time, and too little excitement,” said Paul Todd, Chief Product Officer, Rearden Commerce. “Deem changes all of that by filtering relevant options, enabling collaboration and executing booking – from the point of discovery through to memorializing the trip experiences.”
Within Deem Travel, the new Storyboard™ planning tool provides travelers with the ability to work together through a trip’s stages – Dream, Plan, Book, Travel, Remember™ – collaborating on the journey each step of the way. Deem is the only platform that pairs collaboration with the ability to quickly and easily book an itinerary.
Dream:
At the initial dream stage, Deem enables the person contemplating the trip to clip, collect, organize, analyze, and save information about the trip they aspire to take – including flight, hotel and rental car.
To aid with discovery, the Deem relevance engine considers an individual’s preferences, as well as semantic and contextual information – including the traveler’s location, past bookings, job responsibilities and personal identifiers. For example, when searching for a place to stay, Deem takes into account proximity, preferences, goals, and statistical information (e.g., best sellers that fit your travel profile) to deliver the top choices out of hundreds to meet the travelers’ needs. Similar relevance filtering is also applied to flight selection.
Plan:
Deem Travel provides travelers/planners with the opportunity to share their trip ideas with friends/colleagues to build an ideal itinerary. Utilizing the Storyboard tool, travelers/planners can comment on one another’s selections, recommend additional selections, view important ancillary information, agree to the trip components and see the total cost of the trip all from the Deem Travel experience. In addition, Storyboard keeps track of price sensitive, perishable inventory by reflecting changes in pricing and availability of any “clipped” items.
Book:
With all aspects of the trip integrated, making the ideal trip a reality is as easy as clicking on “purchase” in Deem Travel to book all of the trip components seamlessly within the Storyboard planning tool. Travelers will see reflected on Storyboard when someone has booked a particular aspect of the trip for themselves, delineating a confirmed booking by highlighting the item onscreen in green. In addition, fellow travelers receive an automated alert via email when someone has booked a flight, hotel or rental car.
Travel:
As the trip unfolds and situations change, the travelers are able to leverage their mobile devices to make additional dining reservations; communicate updates/changes to others in an integrated manner; make or view changes to their itinerary; and receive real-time travel alerts.
In addition, travelers may add comments along the way to Storyboard – e.g., “great restaurant,” “need a car service if leaving at rush hour,” “mediocre hotel service,” etc. – providing the opportunity to preserve those personal experiences for future trips.
Remember:
Deem Travel saves the itinerary along with the traveler’s historic trip portfolio in a centralized area on Storyboard until deleted, preserving all of the traveler’s reviews and comments to help inform future trips. Itineraries for particularly memorable trips can be shared with friends, colleagues, and travel planners, as an experience they should emulate or avoid. Remembering also extends to saving that trip for future rebooking – especially convenient for the business traveler who frequents the same destinations.
“The idea for our Storyboard functionality was born of frustration that we observed in the travel arranging process,” continued Mr. Todd. “While there are many different tools that do one-off tasks well, we believe Deem Travel is the only platform that can take the process through the entire trip lifecycle, thereby relieving frustration. Ultimately we want to bring ease-of-use and efficiency to the process, providing more time for exploration and effective decision making. We will continue to build features and add functionality, including merchant offers, to the delight of the leisure and business traveler, the travel planner and the travel buyer.”
Rearden Commerce will present Deem Travel collaboration and relevance functionality at the annual PhoCusWright Travel Innovation Summit today at 1:19 pm EST. To watch the presentation via live streaming video, visit http://pcwi.phocuswright.com/PC11-online-ticket.html.
About Rearden Commerce
Rearden Commerce, creator of the Deem™ ecommerce platform, is transforming commerce on behalf of buyers and sellers. Through a suite of interoperable smart applications, the Deem platform is designed to leverage big data, analytics and semantics technology to optimize the exchange of goods, services, and information with personalization and repeat value to drive customer loyalty. The Deem platform’s smart commerce solutions seek to optimize daily business functions, including travel, procurement and expense management, and are distributed globally by more than 40 strategic partners including American Express and JPMorgan Chase – connecting millions of consumers and over 7,500 business customers across every market segment to more than 1.2 million merchants. Rearden Commerce is headquartered in Foster City, California. For more information about Rearden Commerce, visit http://www.reardencommerce.com/#!/company/about.html; and to learn more about Deem, visit http://www.deem.com.
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