In the first two posts in this series (Part 1 and Part 2 ), we provided background on the recently announced Rearden/Travelport deal. We also offered up a bit of history on the evolution and transformation of online travel agencies (OTA), including their migration from serving just the business to consumer world into serving the B2B community as well. In this final post, we'll provide a 30,000 foot fly-over of the business travel market based on the Rearden/Travelport deal (though look for regular and continued expanded coverage of this area on Spend Matters going forward) and we'll offer up some additional analysis of Rearden's prospects with Travelport. We'll also cover our perspective on current unmet needs in business travel from a procurement standpoint. With that, let's begin.

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In the first post in this series, we covered the basics of Rearden's recent partnership announcement with Travelport. Today we'll look at some of the needs of B2B travel, as well as how Rearden is addressing the market with their solution. We'll conclude with a final post in this series next week by looking more closely at Rearden's relationship with Travelport and their overall direction in the market. And we can't resist tossing in our perception of what we believe are unmet travel needs from a cost management and cost reduction standpoint today.

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