Travelport is acquiring Deem from Enterprise Holdings, which has owned the corporate travel technology platform since January 2019. Deem provides a suite of online booking and travel technology products for business travelers, travel managers, travel management companies and suppliers.
Terms of the acquisition are not being disclosed. Deem will remain as its own brand within Travelport and will maintain its existing integrations with other global distribution systems, including Sabre and Amadeus, while Travelport will continue to support third-party booking solutions such as Concur and Serko.
“We want to have as much depth and breadth of reach as possible into the corporate travel environment and realize that part of that comes with partnerships, and we’ll continue to have those partnerships moving forward,” says Greg Webb, CEO of Travelport.
“Deem is considered to be the most modern, the most easy to use, the most effective corporate online booking tool, and that goes right in line with what we’ve been doing with Travelport+. And so as we looked at really driving a new modern experience for both travel agencies and corporate travelers, they were just a natural fit to be part of Travelport.”
This is Travelport’s first acquisition under Webb, who joined the company in August 2019. Since that time, it has sold two companies – Hotelzon, which it sold to TripStax in December and Locomote, another corporate booking tool, that it sold back to its founders in July 2020.
“Locomote was a very niche application and not focused on the largest corporate travel segment [North America],” Webb says.
“Deem has continued to prove their value in the North America corporate marketplace and, by leveraging Travelport’s technology, brand and sales reach, we have an opportunity to expand the global corporate travel market in a dramatic way.”
Webb says uniting the two companies will benefit customers of both brands as Deem is fully integrated into the Travelport+ environment in the next 120 days.
“They’ll take advantage of the fact that we have global reach that they haven’t necessarily had in the past, they’ll take advantage of some technical synergies associated with how we operate,” Webb says.
“And Deem has used some other third parties for some of their NDC connections, so they’ll take advantage of the fact that we have a much more extensive NDC collection of airlines … and we’ll take advantage of their very successful sales force in terms of selling into the corporate travel space.”
When asked if Deem’s leadership will remain, Webb says, “The entity is moving as a whole, obviously this is day one.”
As to whether Travelport has more acquisitions in its sights, Webb says, “We’ll continue to look for things that enhance the overall Travelport+ environment as well as enhance the capabilities we can to bring to market. So we’ll continue to be opportunistic.”
