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Travelport relies on diversity to compete

November 22, 2006 |

Without a trace of irony, president and CEO Jeff Clarke wastes no time in describing Travelport as a travel-services conglomerate. Just a year ago, the term "conglomerate" was an epithet within former parent company Cendant Corp.

Without a trace of irony, president and CEO Jeff Clarke wastes no time in describing Travelport as a travel-services conglomerate. Just a year ago, the term “conglomerate” was an epithet within former parent company Cendant Corp.

Former Cendant chairman and CEO Henry R. Silverman cited the discount that stockholders and analysts assigned to the company’s structure as an umbrella for several industries, and the Byzantine financial statements that came with it, as a chief culprit in the stock price moving little in seven years.

As the answer, Cendant was broken into four pieces on the theory that investors would rather own stock in individual industries that they liked than have to buy a package.

The rehabilitation of the conglomerate, in Clarke’s view, gives Travelport the base that it needs to ride out the turbulence of computer travel booking as well as pay down the $3.6 billion in junk-bond debt that it shouldered when New York investment firm Blackstone Group bought it for $4.3 billion in August.

“We have an incredible amount of geographic diversity and an incredible amount of business diversity,” he said while sitting in the lush former Cendant headquarters on West 57th Street that the company will soon vacate. “We have a company that is hard to match in the travel industry.”

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