Flight Centre Completes Acquisition of WhereTo

Flight Centre Travel Group (FCTG) has completed its acquisition of San Francisco-based WhereTo, an enterprise travel platform and technology company that aims to simplify and improve business travel planning for corporations.

WhereTo pulls in content from dozens of sources and uses artificial intelligence-based algorithms to quickly guide users to the optimal trip options within policy, factoring in criteria like traffic conditions, travel deals, and personal preferences.

This acquisition follows on the heels of several other technology-based businesses that FCTG has acquired or invested in since the beginning of the year, including TPConnects and Shep Travel.

FCTG plans to integrate the WhereTo offering into products and services offered across both its FCM Travel Solutions and Corporate Traveller brands globally.

“As a leading travel management company, FCM is committed to helping our customers adapt and stay ahead with data-enabled, traveller-centric technology solutions that would allow them to emerge from the crisis stronger than before,” said Bertrand Saillet, Managing Director for FCM Travel Solutions in Asia. “WhereTo not only supports FCTG’s efforts to advance and scale the corporate travel business, it enables us to address a wider range of customer needs post pandemic. Its capabilities and specialisation complements and champions the same values we have, and that is to provide corporate customers with best-in-class technology tools that are simple, personalised, accurate and efficient at the same time.”

Over the past several years, FCTG has put a great deal of emphasis and resources to build a dynamic and robust system that can easily work in tandem with a variety of technologies and platforms utilised by airline partners. The partnership with WhereTo is a critical step in building a customer experience from the ground up that can handle an increasingly complex distribution environment.

“The need to provide our customers with an advanced digital platform that accentuates the blended service model we offer is further heightened with the COVID19 pandemic,” said FCTG Chief Experience Officer John Morhous. “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 & control’ of user experiences which underpin the strategies of the FCM Travel Solutions and Corporate Traveller brands.”

Details of the acquisition have not been disclosed.

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