GDSs Adding Travel Agent Functionality

<B>GDSs Adding Travel Agent Functionality</B>

By David Jonas

Northwest Airlines late last month implemented new automated reservations procedures within Worldspan, with the goal of improving customer satisfaction, increasing the availability of seats for sale on full flights and reducing the number of denied aircraft boardings. While Northwest's enhanced inventory control, from the consumer perspective, simply is a match of what most other majors already have implemented, the difference lies in the automation built into Worldspan that will help agencies avoid debit memos.

Amadeus, Galileo and Worldspan, meanwhile, all are in various stages of developing internal systems to track and report unused electronic tickets. Sabre has offered such a system to its connected agencies free of charge for a year. While many corporations already can take advantage of such tracking systems from larger agencies or buy one from one of several third-party vendors, availability from the GDSs presumably would help many more travel managers keep tabs on unused segments for free.

The most notable of Northwest's enhancements within Worldspan, dubbed Ticket to Confirm, requires that all reservations made in the GDS be priced with a fare quote before they can be completed. Currently, a reservation can be created without actually issuing a ticket, which takes up inventory. Now, an auto-cancel procedure will cancel reservations that have not been ticketed prior to the ticketing expiration period of the fare rule and return that inventory to the carrier.

"We strongly believe that these new controls will place back for sale a lot of inventory that previously was held back and ended up as no-shows," said Al Lenza, Northwest Airlines vice president of distribution planning. "We have told all the other GDSs that failure to match Worldspan in the very near future will put their agencies in a difficult position and expose them to debit memos in the back end. We firmly believe that Worldspan accounts will be at a competitive advantage as a result of this."

In other words, Worldspan-connected agents will be protected from incurring debit memos since the automated system will eliminate violations before they occur. Northwest said it will continue to use a back-end audit process with other GDSs until the automated solution is in place.

John Haisley, manager of industry relations at WorldTravel Partners, said there is a downside. "We feel this is an unnecessary intrusion by a carrier into managing our business," he said. "Computers are a great thing, but I am apprehensive about having an itinerary canceled when it shouldn't have been, and explaining to the clients what had happened."

Worldspan officials said the new product, which took two years to develop, specifically was requested by Northwest. While the product is available to other carriers and some have shown interest, no others have announced plans to enlist.

Delta, for one, said, "There is some new technology that we could take advantage of," but already uses similar functionality in its internal systems. Should Delta, or any other carrier, opt to use the new Worldspan offering, it would have to be implemented on an individual bilateral basis since each carrier has its own computer system within the GDS.

Northwest's other modifications, currently for Worldspan bookings only, include a no-show cancellation policy that automatically will cancel remaining Northwest segments on a ticket if a customer does not check in for any flight segment on his or her itinerary. The policy is intended to discourage the practice of purchasing a roundtrip ticket for one-way travel and hidden city ticketing--buying an additional trip leg to another city--to get a lower fare.

Northwest's new strategy is an addendum to a procedure it implemented last year to return seats to inventory when customers fail to check in for the outbound portion of their trip.

"This will put an end to a lot of guilty practices by travel agents," said Terry Trippler, airline expert at Onetravel.com. "It will enable Northwest to get a much better handle on denied boardings, which they are good at anyway."

Indeed, the latest figures released by the U.S. Department of Transportation show Northwest's 4Q99 and full-year 1999 denied boarding ratio was lowest among the 10 majors, each figure at one-fifth of the industry average.

"Northwest and Worldspan won't be the only ones controlling this," Trippler predicted of the automated functionality. "Everyone else will get involved."

Indeed, Galileo said it has been working with Northwest to add the additional automation. "We already offer storage of fare quotes and we now are working on the auto-cancel function," a Galileo official said. "It should be available soon."

For its part, Amadeus is developing similar functionality, though its approach is to offer the automation more consistently to multiple carriers. It is expected to debut by year-end.

Meanwhile, all the global distribution systems are playing catch up with Sabre in the area of internal electronic ticket tracking solutions. Sabre's system tracks the status of every ticket issued at 30 days past the travel date. The system then creates a report for the travel agency, detailing which segments have gone unused. Though complimentary, the system does not include automated refund functionality.

Jeff Pounds, product manager at Sabre, said the system--released about a year ago--now is used at about 7,000 Sabre travel agencies. "It's ideal for agencies with a high e-ticket volume and a corporate client base," he said. "The tracking is very intensive for the Sabre system, so we don't encourage other agencies to use it." Pounds added that Sabre opted to offer the tracking for free as an alternative to "hefty-priced" third-party systems in order to promote e-ticket usage. "Those systems offer more functionality, and they should for the price you are paying," Pounds said. "But our product fits the need, was out to market in four to six months and has received great feedback from users."

However, Sabre is considering improvements to the product that could include additional information from the PNR to make it that much easier for agencies to locate unused tickets.

Amadeus plans to go one step further. Its tracking system--currently in development and expected by the fourth quarter--will be an interactive tracking tool that will track e-tickets regardless of the date of travel. "It will give Amadeus agencies a competitive advantage because the tracking is more timely than those offered through third- party vendors," said Robert Buckman, product manager at Amadeus, adding that it would come in handy in possible airline strike scenarios. "It will be more robust and proactive." However, Amadeus has yet to decide if the solution will be offered free of charge.

Once up and running, Amadeus' tracking solution will complement the GDS's emphasis on e-ticketing. For example, a host-based product that connects all airline users and will facilitate e-ticket interlining is similar in concept to the system proposed last year by IBM and IATA.

At Amadeus, the Electronic Ticketing Server already has users, such as Finnair, and enables more Amadeus airlines around the world to quickly establish their e-ticketing capabilities. "We wanted to get this out to market because Amadeus has more airlines offering e-ticketing to U.S. customers than any other GDS," Buckman said. "We need this internal solution that can follow us into new markets, such as Mexico." Interlining through ETS is expected later this year.

Meanwhile, Galileo, through its Global Partners Solutions group, offers three unused e-ticket tracking systems from third-party vendors, often packaged with a suite of products. However, it too is working on its own internal system but is in the preliminary stages of development.

Likewise for Worldspan, which recommends certain third-party software but is evaluating a product that would run on its mainframe.

Of course, many corporations may enlist third-party software to track their unused e-tickets or rely on their agency partner, as British Telecom has done with BTI UK (<I>BTN,</I> March 20). American Express, for example, through its TicketTRAX product has saved 40 or 50 clients a combined $16 million by identifying unused nonrefundable segments. Unlike the GDS systems, TicketTRAX--and many other third-party and agency systems--also automates refunds, which replaces the manual processes normally required of travel agents.