Expedia, Inc. Accelerates Time to Market With Electronic Signature

In 1996, a small division within Microsoft launched Expedia.com®, which gave consumers a revolutionary new way to research and book travel. Three years later, Expedia was spun out of Microsoft and became a publicly traded company on NASDAQ.

With more people booking travel online in Expedia's global marketplace than anywhere else, Expedia:

• Delivers consumers value in leisure and business travel
• Drives demand for travel suppliers
• Provides advertisers opportunities to reach in-market travel consumers

The Expedia, Inc. portfolio of brands includes Expedia.com, hotels. com®, Venere.com™, Hotwire®, Egencia™, TripAdvisor®, ExpediaLocalExpert®, Classic Vacations® and eLong™. Expedia's companies operate more than 80 global points of sale in nearly 60 countries. Expedia also powers bookings for some of the world's leading airlines and hotels, top consumer brands, high traffic Websites, and thousands of active affiliates through Expedia Affiliate Network.

Expedia's Business Challenge

Before Expedia can offer a travel product to consumers through its Web sites, the company must have signed contracts in place detailing the product's pricing rates, special offers and many other conditions. The contracts range from a few pages to tens of pages in length.

What did the process of adding a new hotel to Expedia's database look like?

1. Market development mangers based in travel destinations around the world obtained signed contracts
2. Convert these signed contracts to PDF (portable document format) files
3. E-mail these files to Expedia corporate headquarters

At headquarters, Gene Harden, director of Lodging for Expedia and his team would:

1. Print the PDFs
2. Route them to the appropriate vice presidents for review
3. Obtain “wet ink” signatures
4. Faxed the signed contracts back to the hotel partners

After printing out all the contracts, we would typically have a 12- to 15-inch stack of paper that had to be routed, signed and faxed every day. The fax machine would be running for four to five hours six days a week sending signed contracts to locations across Europe and Asia. We knew that printing, faxing and manual signing processes were not going to be able meet our requirements for speed or scale up to handle hundreds of contracts per week. - Gene Harden, director of Lodging

DocuSign's Corporate Enterprise Electronic Signature Services Delivers Results

Expedia selected DocuSign's Corporate Enterprise electronic signature services, to eliminate the labor-intensive paper contracting processes.

Through its use of DocuSign, Expedia's international market development managers can now obtain signatures from U.S. based vice presidents in real time. With contracts signed faster, new offerings are brought to market quicker and customers can start booking travel to more hotels sooners.

Additionally, many hotels offer introductory rates when they join the Expedia service. With a quicker to-market time for these offerings, Expedia can make these special rates available to customers for a longer period of time. For a high traffic service such as Expedia, even a few days makes a significant impact on revenue generation and customer satisfaction.

Using the DocuSign e-signing service, market development managers prepare documents with virtual sign here or initial here tabs and transmit them directly to executives in the U.S. for review and signature.

To sign the document, the vice president simply clicks on the sign here tabs and hits send to complete the process. A two-minute Web demonstration made it easy for managers and executives to learn the DocuSign service. The signed contracts are fully encrypted, stored electronically and easily accessible through a Web browser.

In addition to speed, DocuSign gives Expedia's market development managers:

• Better control over the signing process
• Greater visibility into the contract signing process
• Ability to see which signer is next in queue to review and / or sign

With a permanent, online record of each contract, the managers have better control over their hotel relationships and can allow new managers to easily step in with full access to current and past records.

Expedia is a fast moving, online business, and we want to use the smartest services available. We were impressed from the start with how quickly and easily DocuSign helped us obtain signed contracts. - Gene Harden

Since the initial deployment of DocuSign, Expedia has expanded the use of DocuSign e-signature service in other departments, including Expedia Human Resources and Recruiting.

Click for more information about DocuSign Corporate Enterprise e-signature services.