This seems to be my technofocus weekend—see my blog about Twitter yesterday—and I came across another new thing that’s even more focused on business travelers, Rearden Commerce.
Rearden has, I gathered from this Techcrunch blog, a “killer app” when it comes to planning and booking business travel.
It ties together all your personal preferences, company rules, airline and hotel booking restrictions, other travel-related suppliers, special deals etc. to let you search for everything you need at once. In other words, you can go to one place and see multiple airline flights that meet your requirements, available hotel rooms that meet your preferences, restaurants that can be booked online, available tickets for shows or sporting events at your destination, car rentals in your preferred category, weather, traffic, etc.
It’s set up as a “personal assistant” that in effect does all the surfing one would normally need to do to collect all the diverse information. Once you’ve planned your trip it even asks if you need to ship anything ahead and opens a screen for that to; it can also help you set up conference calls. Sounds pretty useful.
The Rearden Personal Assistant has been mostly available to companies – more than 1,700 hundred corporations at last count – but it’s definitely set up to appeal to consumers and with its recent capital influx, I’m guessing it will be more widely available to individuals soon.
– Mary Hunt, editor, eFlyer
