CEO: Serko 'Just Getting Started' with GetThere Acquisition

Serko's acquisition of GetThere was a big move that propelled the company to the No. 2 spot among corporate online booking providers in North America, but it's only one part of a broader investment strategy the company has planned over the next few years to become a wide-spanning platform, chief executive and co-founder Darrin Grafton told BTN.

Scale was an obvious benefit to the US$12 million acquisition, which the company expects to close near the beginning of next year, with GetThere's "massive brand recognition" and customer base of "some very big global programs," Grafton said. Serko also is acquiring "some pretty amazing talent" in the team behind GetThere, he said.

Although GetThere, one of the oldest corporate online booking tools on the market, currently has a reputation as a "legacy" product compared with some of the newer interfaces, Grafton said developers had not been sleeping on the technology.

"We looked at a lot of the stuff they've been doing with GetThere that probably wasn't visible to the public," Grafton said. "Behind the scenes, they've been building some pretty good modernization of their platform. Some of the parts they've actually built in there were really impressive."

Part of that has been built through Sabre's partnership with Google and its migration to Google Cloud, announced in 2020, which he said would be a key to further growth.

Serko's Zeno booking tool "has been doing quite big customers, the size of [global mining group Rio Tinto] and government agencies in Australasia, but we haven't been across 100 countries with our enterprise technology—but Google has," Grafton said. "We've been in 180 countries in our [small and midsized business] platform, and if we could take that and have a platform that could span from SMB to large enterprise, we cover all the customers and also have all the insights how possible configuration is done."

As such, Grafton said the long-term plan for Serko would be for multiple brands—including GetThere, Zeno and Booking.com for Business, for which it is the technology partner—empowered by that "common platform." Alongside the GetThere announcement, Serko said it would invest about NZ$40 million (US$23.5 million) over the next four years in product and technology.

"Our foundation on that is to leverage as much of the AI shift that's occurring to bring about a platform where our TMCs and other startups and everything can build across all our platforms, where that's GetThere, Zeno or Booking for Business," Grafton said. "This is going to be one of many things we do in the market to move forward as we head through to 2030 at this point, and we're not stopping. We're just getting started."

That could include additional acquisitions, according to Grafton. "Our strategy is more around how we partner well and make sure what we're building on our platform is core to accelerating those partners, but if there's a way of partnering or helping that partner accelerate our outcome through investments that Serko can make, then we want to work together with people," he said.

He added such an acquisition would not be a TMC or anything that created a conflict with Serko's partnership strategy.

The GetThere acquisition, meanwhile, also came with a new partnership with Sabre, with a five-year initial term, including co-development, co-investment and co-marketing. "We will see things that the market should be moving toward, and we can help our partners like Sabre invest in them and bring them to light," Grafton said. "We can help them showcase that benefit to the wider industry as well."

In addition, Grafton said the acquisition resolves a long-running dispute. Serko traces its origins back to Grafton and co-founder Bob Shaw founding Interactive Technologies in 1994 to deal with agency mid- and back-office system challenges, which pivoted to corporate travel booking by 2000. GetThere, meanwhile, started as the Internet Travel Network in 1995 and became GetThere in 1999 prior to its acquisition by Sabre.

"We always debated who invented online travel first: Was it Serko or GetThere?" Grafton said. "Now, it doesn't matter."