With websites’ aid, groups can have their trips made to order

PLANNING travel for a group can be a lot like herding cats. Trying to coordinate members of groups with busy lives and diverse travel tastes and needs can be an enormous challenge for the group’s travel leader as well as its individual travelers.

Fortunately, websites for booking and planning group travel such as Groople.com and GroupTravelPlanet.com have added helpful tools.

Groups are loosely defined as any party of travelers looking for five or more hotel rooms. Types of groups are as diverse as individual travelers -- sports teams, religious groups, seniors, families going to reunions, even bachelor and bachelorette parties. It was a $36-billion industry in 2002, the last year for which statistics were available, according to the Travel Industry Assn. of America, a trade group.

Business for the segment is growing, said Scott Harness, chief executive and cofounder of GroupTravelPlanet. He reports that bookings this year for his 6-year-old company are up 153% from last year.

That growth is, in part, because of travelers like Jim Morey of Huntington Beach, who are comfortable using the Web to book travel. Last July, he volunteered to organize the hotels for an all-star softball tournament in which his daughters Julia, 9, and Loren, 13, were playing in Carlsbad.

He wanted to find one well-priced hotel that could accommodate the whole tournament because “it’s more fun for the girls to stay in the same hotel.”

His experience mirrors Groople’s customer research.

Mike Stacy, Groople chief executive, says group travelers are most interested in easily comparing hotel amenities, location and price.

When Morey made an inquiry through Groople, he received several good options for the 70 rooms he needed. He then started working with a Groople agent, who helped him reserve the rooms and arrange for each family to pay.

“The beautiful thing was, once I set it up they could go into the website, put in their name and their credit card, and everybody paid individually,” he said.

Having access to a person is another selling point for these websites, though most of the bookings can be made and managed online. Sixty percent of the groups that use GroupTravelPlanet never have to speak to a person until they check in to the hotel, Harness said.

The economics of group travel make it possible for the 40% to have a little extra attention that they might not receive on a regular travel website.

“Right now, they make an average transaction north of $2,000,” Groople’s Stacy said. “We can afford to have a little more hand-holding associated with that transaction.”

Groople this month launched a redesigned website with several new features, including tailored hotel searches that provide results only from hotels that fit your group’s needs. By using a pull-down menu, a group leader can say what kind of group it is, and Groople automatically searches for hotels with amenities that cater to that group. For example, a baseball team coach who requires an on-site, all-you-can-eat breakfast for his team will be looking for different amenities from the organizer of a bachelorette party. Groople allows a group leader to select several properties, then invite group members to offer input through the website and vote for the hotel where they want to stay.

Functionality was lacking in some areas of the redesigned Groople site, including the inability to click on the 31 hidden freebies button on the home page to find out what they were. The changes, which took effect this month, are ongoing, Stacy said.

james.gilden@latimes.com