New Business Venture -- InterRide Corp. -- Delivers First Realtime, Online Car and Limousine Reservations in High Growth Online Travel Market
20 September 2000
New Business Venture -- InterRide Corp. -- Delivers First Realtime, Online Car and Limousine Reservations in High Growth Online Travel Market
PISCATAWAY, NJ--Sept. 20, 2000--| -- | InterRide Commercially Launches with 14 Limousine and Car Networks -- |
| -- | Launches with Corporate Customers, Including SilverLine Technologies, Using System for Car Reservations -- |
| -- | GetThere Business Travel Portal Integrates InterRide Into Its Site -- |
| -- | Online Sites "Powered By InterRide" Expected To Grow Dramatically -- |
A new company, InterRide Corporation, officially launched today, entering one of the fastest growing markets -- the online travel bookings market -- which is estimated to reach $20.3 billion by 2004, according to Forrester Research.
InterRide is the first and only "vendor neutral infrastructure" to use Internet technology to deliver one-stop, online, and real-time industry-wide reservations and confirmations for travelers booking car and limousine services. InterRide uses Internet technology to realize new efficiencies for corporate travel, while offering every car and limousine service provider access to larger markets and state-of-the-art business management and online reservation systems.
InterRide's newly created service gives travelers the ability to make and change reservations for car and limousine services over the Internet, on the telephone, and using cell phones or their personal digital assistants (PDAs). Corporate customers can use the online features to manage their existing relationships with individual local and national service providers and car service networks. The car and limousine service providers gain access to a state-of-the-art business management system that, in turn, gives them access to larger markets and makes booking car services as easy as reserving hotels, flights or automobile rentals.
Himanshu Shukla, Chairman and CEO of InterRide, said: "InterRide offers people, who need to book car reservations at the time of their other travel arrangements, a vendor neutral, single-stop reservation source in the rapidly growing online travel market. This is a breakthrough for the car services industry, not only because car reservations, for the first time, are simple and convenient, but also car and limousine companies can gain access to national markets without capital costs."
Travelers accessing a site Powered by InterRide (a sample can be seen at www.InterRide.com), through their corporate intranet, extranet, or travel portals, will have the ability to immediately reserve car services over the Internet, just as they do with hotels or flights, in real-time and in any city. The first portal to integrate InterRide is GetThere (www.getthere.com), the leading provider of Internet-based business-to-business travel systems, which announced its agreement with InterRide on September 12, 2000.
InterRide's initial corporate customers include Silverline Technologies, Inc (SLT), which has been using the InterRide-powered web site of Best Limo for making ground transportation reservations for over 400 employees in the U.S. "With no up-front or user cost, the corporate travel group uses a standardized interface, with a customized data base on the reservation system Powered by InterRide. That makes it easy to reserve car service, meet our corporate travel requirements and process the information for paperless accounting," noted Cindy Fierst, Silverline's Travel Desk Manager.
The initial market consists of about 10,400 chauffeured ground transportation providers in the United States and their customers with estimated annual revenues of about $5 billion (a subset of the total online business travel market).
Car and limousine service companies using the infrastructure, customized to meet their specific requirements, may realize as much as a 50 percent reduction in their front-end reservation costs. Car service providers will also gain access to the growing market of corporations migrating to online travel booking systems.
"InterRide enables limousine operators to take advantage of e-commerce, which provides access to new and larger markets, while still maintaining their independence of operations," said Himanshu Shukla. "At the same time, finally the corporate travel manager or business travelers themselves can book ground transportation with the same kind of real-time efficiency as booking hotels and airline tickets, while dramatically simplifying the labor intensive "back office" functions associated with corporate limousine travel. For both the industry and the traveler, InterRide provides a unique service that is long overdue. Corporations no longer need to invest in new technologies or develop programs for processing and approving car vouchers, bills and accounts."
With InterRide now commercially available, 14 limousine and car service companies will become Powered by InterRide in the next several weeks, giving business travelers access to online, real time car service reservations in cities such as Boston, Fort Lauderdale, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, New Jersey, New York, Phoenix and San Francisco. In recent weeks more than 200 multinational corporations have expressed interest in implementing InterRide's systems.
"InterRide's technology, enabling real-time reservations to meet my company's specific requirements is a quantum leap ahead of shrink-wrapped software packages of the past and has already resulted in our ability to deliver better service, more efficiently," said Navaid Gul, of Best Limo in New Jersey (www.mybestlimo.com)
The Company's principal institutional investors are: Key Principal Partners and Lombard Odier & Cie. Founded in 1999, InterRide has recently completed a series of pilot tests of its core system and expects to announce additional business developments over the coming weeks. Its headquarters are in Piscataway, N.J.