Corporate-booking tool vendor GetThere revamped its ticket-exchange capabilities for road warriors in partnership with ITA Software.

GetThere says business travelers, depending on their industry, exchange 20% to 50% of all tickets annually, and its beefed-up Ticket Manager Exchange enables them to exchange a ticketed flight online, saving corporations big bucks and reducing the need for manual intervention.

GetThere has had ticket-exchange functionality in place since 2004, but the improved Ticket Manager Exchange, introduced in beta early this year, provides new features.

Paul Wiley, GetThere’s director of product and customer experience, says the company modified its existing ticket-exchange functionality through the use of a ticket exchange and refund engine [pdf] from ITA Software.

Enhancements, GetThere says, include the ability to make exchanges on partially flown trips and the presence of exchange cost calculations, among others.

One TMC which tested Ticket Manager Exchange during the beta period reports that online ticket exchanges increased as much as 50% since the introduction of the new features, GetThere says.

Part of the impetus for business travelers to exchange unused tickets is the “visual guilt” that the ticket exchange service employs, including unused- ticket messaging on the homepage and throughout the shopping process, Wiley says.

Ticket Manager Exchange works with multiple GDSs — and not just with the GDS offering from Sabre, GetThere’s parent — and it provides business travelers with the ability to exchange tickets mid-trip if their plans change for domestic and international flights.

Travelers also can execute exchanges for itineraries which use multiple airlines.

GeThere is making Ticket Manager Exchange available to corporations first in U.S. points of sale and the company plans to offer it to global points of sale beginning in the third quarter, Wiley says.

GetThere will team with Tata Communications to offer GetThere’s corporate clients a video and conference-call solution so they can conduct virtual meetings without hopping a plane.

It’s all good for the environment and a smart move as GetThere is offering corporations access to Tata Communications’  public and private Telepresence rooms — replete with high-definition video and audio hook-ups — as a way to enhance efficiency and lower the boom on large corporate carbon footprints.

Still, it’s a bit of an ironic twist for a travel company, Sabre’s GetThere, to be discouraging, well, travel.

Tata’s telepresence tag line is: “Better than being there.”

Tata Communications and GetThere shortly will begin pilot tests of the program, and plan on a broader rollout later this year.

When it comes to business travel, Sabre’s TripCase appears relatively agnostic about global distribution systems.

But, for leisure-travel consumers, it’s got a much longer way to go.

TripCase’s multi-GDS approach for business travel became apparent when it announced it will offer its mobile-messaging and itinerary-management services to corporations through sister company GetThere, starting in the third quarter.

From its early days, GetThere, a corporate-self booking tool, has used all of the major GDSs. GetThere’s footprint extends to 79 countries and it is used by most of the 100 largest corporate-travel programs in the U.S.

At rollout in the third quarter, GetThere Mobile Powered by TripCase, as it is branded, will automatically sync bookings with TripCase when the traveler’s corporation uses the Sabre GDS. If a traveler downloads TripCase and makes a booking through the Travelport Galileo, Apollo or Worldspan, or Amadeus GDSs, then there is no automatic sync and the traveler can forward their itineraries to TripCase.

But, TripCase and GetThere teams are working on PNR synchronization tools so an Amadeus or Travelport booking would likewise automatically be consolidated into a TripCase itinerary, the companies say.

They hope to have this multi-GDS PNR synchronization in place before the end of the year.

So, why isn’t this capability in place already?

Is it a matter of getting the other GDSs to sign on to the arrangement?

Not really, says Michael O’Connell, director of business development at TripCase, because GetThere has always been a multi-GDS solution.

“This is not a question of agreements with other GDSs,” O’Connell says. “It is more of an allocation of resources and time for development and testing to ensure a seamless experience for travelers.”

Although corporations, with their far-flung operations, likely demand this kind of multi-GDS approach, it remains to be seen whether Sabre, which offers its own GDS, will take the same approach with leisure travelers who use TripCase.

For now, if a leisure traveler uses TripCase and books a trip on Sabre’s Travelocity or any other company tied to the Sabre GDS, the booking gets automatically loaded into the user’s TripCase itinerary.

However, bookings made through Orbitz, which uses Worldspan and Apollo, don’t get automatically synched up. Consumers booking on Orbitz and other travel agencies not using the Sabre GDS, have to manually forward their itineraries to TripCase for inclusion.

I suspect that Sabre is not as amenable to leveling the GDS playing field at this juncture for leisure travelers as it is for GetThere’s corporate clients, who demand multi-GDS functionality.

When GetThere Mobile is introduced in the third quarter, business travelers will get the now-standard itinerary views and flight notifications.

Travel managers also will be able to send a message to all of their employees in a particular city in case of an emergency or other time-sensitive event.

The GetThere and TripCase teams are said also to be working on booking capabilities that adhere to corporate travel policies.

Such hotel-booking capability is slated to be in place by the end of 2010, and air and car booking is on the agenda for 2011, the companies say.

BCD Travel, the global travel management company, signed a global distribution agreement with Sabre’s GetThere, making BCD Travel a reseller of the corporate self-booking tool.

The pact formalizes the relationship between BCD Travel and GetThere as many BCD Travel clients already use GetThere.

In fact, GetThere says the tool is used by business travelers in 76 countries, and the majority of the 100 largest travel programs in the U.S. use GetThere.

GetThere says that BCD Travel, as a GetThere reseller, will be able to influence product enhancements and gets access to GetThere customer service resources.

BCD Travel, of course, already had an agreement with the GDS side of the Sabre business.