Flight Centre buys business travel management platform WhereTo

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.

“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.”