Under development since late 2000, GroupMinder springs from the many years of group travel experience of Joel Malnick and Sarah Twibell, co-owners of Collegiate Athletic Travel (CAT), a national leader in sports travel management since 1972.

Since 1980, Malnick and Twibell have overseen and participated in the design of several proprietary group reservation systems for CAT, as well as a system for Great Times Out, an air-inclusive golf packaging business they operated for ten years under the USAirways banner.

While these applications, all DOS based, served their purposes well for the time, by the late 90’s, with the new Millennium approaching and fresh solutions required, Malnick and Twibell decided to forego yet another proprietary route. Instead, they licensed some existing “industry developed” software.

In 2000, after two frustrating years working with two different applications (neither of which had the functionality of CAT’s earlier systems), Malnick and Twibell joined with Luis Melo, an experienced developer of travel related web-based software, and Jen Bagshaw, CAT’s IT and administrative manager, to design another new system for CAT. Using the latest database and development technology, their goal was to provide CAT with an up-to-date, fully integrated web-based marketing and group reservation system (see “The Application”).

As development proceeded, the beta version of GroupMinder was introduced to two free-lance travel directors (one of whom was a veteran ski tour operator and the other a professional meeting planner) who assisted CAT in managing its 2000-01 bowl season programs. At the same time, several of CAT’s travel agent partners also used GroupMinder to directly book their clients on CAT’s packages via the system’s “extranet”. The consensus among these users was that GroupMinder was not only easy to learn and use, but that it was the best group reservation application any of them had ever seen--by far.

With this encouragement, the CAT principals and Melo decided to start from scratch and re-engineer the infant system with an eye toward marketing it to a broad spectrum of group travel providers, including: general and specialty tour companies, motorcoach tour operators, charter package wholesalers, group cruise specialists, meeting planners, and incentive houses.

By the summer of 2002, version 1.0 of GroupMinder was ready for beta testing and demonstration, and by end of the year, two companies in addition to CAT were using the system. In 2003, Renae Greene, a 14-year employee of CAT with strong computer application skills, and Nuno Olivera, a recent CSI graduate of Glamorgan University in England joined the GroupMinder effort-- Renae in training and support, and Nuno in development. And, in 2004, Nancy Levitsky, formerly CAT’s operations manager and Tour Coordinator for the Penn State Alumni Association, joined the staff of GTT.

With its introduction at TRAMS Tech University 2005, GroupMinder will be formally launched on a national level. In addition to developing interfaces for ClientBase Plus and TRAMS Back Office, further development of the system calls for adding cruise and meeting-specific user interfaces, tour profit-loss accounting, simplified package building and increased overall functionality.