The competitive balance in online travel sales may shift as Issaquah, WA-based Costco Travel, a wholly owned subsidiary of Costco Wholesale Corporation, launches its U.S. consumer travel website. Costco reports it has 40 million members as the potential nationwide audience with the website promising to be a retail powerhouse. According to HyperTech Solutions, Costco worked closely with HyperTech Solutions to create its booking engine using HyperTech’s PleX product.
The Costco relationship with HyperTech Solutions began in 2005 when the core application was installed as the booking system for the Costco Travel call center operation. Based on the success of the PleX engine, Costco decided to base the upgrade of its consumer website on the same core PleX application and again turned to HyperTech Solutions.
Costco currently operates 546 warehouses, including 400 in the U.S. and Puerto Rico, 76 in Canada, 20 in the UK, six in Korea, five in Taiwan, eight in Japan and 31 in Mexico. The Company also operates Costco Online, an electronic commerce website, at www.costco.com and at www.costco.ca in Canada. The Company plans to open an additional four new warehouses prior to the end of calendar year 2008.
HyperTech Solutions is headquartered in Elmsford, NY, with offices in London. The company was founded in 1999 to serve the leisure travel industry and HyperTech’s PleX application enables its travel industry customers to source, package and sell complex travel products. It can be configured to operate either stand-alone or integrated into a client's existing software platform.
Visit www.hypertechsolutions.com.