As part of my job with the Emerging Business Team at Microsoft I get to work with cool innovative start-ups. Portaga www.portaga.com is a cool company based in New York working on a travel reservation and management product called Portaga Travel Manager that works seamlessly with Microsoft Office Outlook.
The idea is to empower employees to make their own travel reservations directly from within Outlook and automatically add it to their Outlook calendar. No need to launch a browser, search several different travel sites, figure out the logistics, book the reservations, enter your credit card information, enter the reservation in your calendar, and notify your colleagues of your plans. Portaga lets you do all of this from within Outlook.
The Portaga application figures out the logistics of your trip, presents you with workable choices, books your selections, and enters it in your calendar. For example, say you have a 3:00pm meeting in New York City next Wednesday. You need a shuttle to the airport, flights, rental car, and hotel in New York. Portaga calculates when you will need to leave to make your flight and arrive in time for your meeting at 3:00pm.
This is pretty cool but the really amazing thing is how it handles changes. Lets say your meeting gets moved to Thursday at 1:00pm. You simply go to your Outlook calendar and drag your existing reservation into the new time slot. Portaga will automatically recalculate a new itinerary and rebook everything.
After the trip is complete Portaga will automatically transfer the travel data to your expense reporting system.
I’m sure you can see the potential here for new features, revenue models, partner channels, and follow on products. Just making the whole reservation process quick and easy is a win, but the potential time and cost savings are enormous. Most small and medium size companies don’t have travel departments, lack travel policies, and don’t have negotiated rates with all the suppliers. Portaga enables smaller companies to implement best practices just like the big companies. And, because the application runs in Outlook there is little or no user training necessary.
Portaga was able to build this application using the .Net infrastructure, Office application object models, and XML web services. The extensive use of web services allows easy exchange of data between the travel suppliers, the Portaga application, Microsoft Office Outlook, and the internal company applications such as expense reporting. This is an excellent example of a company using Microsoft Office Outlook as an application platform and a front end user interface.
Portaga is formally launching the Portaga Travel Manager on September 14th in New York City.
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