Prism Waiting On Two GDSs

<B>Prism Waiting On Two GDSs</B>

By Cheryl Rosen

Seven months of concerted effort by the Prism Group to improve the quality of travel data is resulting in a de facto standard that has been widely accepted in the United States and now is moving to travel agencies in Europe. But the fact that neither of the two major European global distribution systems offers all the elements that American travel buyers need continues to hold back the effort.

Along with a number of global corporations that support travel data standards, like Philips and Siemens, Prism is pressuring Amadeus and Galileo to deliver two pieces of information to global buyers: segment amount data, and the tour codes that identify individual corporate customers to allow easy tracking of their purchasing.

The GDSs, meanwhile, maintain that they fully agree on their responsibility to deliver the content their corporate customers need. But they prefer to put their development efforts into moving to more open standards that would allow everyone freer access to travel data.

All the American-based mega agencies and many third-party suppliers already have adopted the Prism Xport standard released in May (<I>BTN</I>, May 17, 1999). Prism grades suppliers on the quality of their data, and makes the results available to the industry at no cost on its Web site (www.Prism-grp.com).

The scores of American suppliers have improved by several hundred points since the standard was first released, said Les Baker, the Prism vice president who has been heading the effort to persuade the GDSs to make the data available. The average score in the United States is up almost 50 percent, from 578 to 839, and about 98 percent of all domestic corporate travel data now can be handed off in the Prism Xport format.

Taking the trend to Europe this fall (<I>BTN</I>, Oct. 11, 1999), Prism already has certified American Express, BTI and Hogg Robinson U.K., a BTI agency. Sandy McKinney, director of data consulting services, said she expects this month to certify data coming from Carlson Wagonlit Travel's European data center in Brussels as well. She also is working with developers of BTI Europe's new GEMS 2000 back-office system, which should earn a rating this month or next.

Virtually all American Express, BTI, Carlson Wagonlit and Rosenbluth International agencies in Europe have signed on. Also newly certified is ICSAT, a back-office system used by many European agencies and expected by insiders to enter the American market soon. And Whitesage said Prism is working with "50 or 60 more agencies around the world."

At Philips Electronics N.V. in Holland, international analyst for travel & hospitality Roel van Herwijnen agreed that the ability to provide carefully calculated data is an important component of negotiations for the company's $200 million annual air travel volume. Having segment data available would offer a double benefit, he said, providing "a solid base to negotiate with our suppliers for the right market, and allowing us to show the airline carriers that we are fulfilling our performance goals on specific markets."

In fact, Philips now is "including our data export specification as a requirement in any agency bid. From now on, any agency bidding for a Philips contract will need to export data according to the specifications. Their back-office systems should be able to provide us the data in the right format." Indeed, he noted, Philips now is investigating the possibility of allowing its airline contractors to access reports on Philips business directly from Prism over the Internet.

Prism's scores for European suppliers have more than doubled since October, though, they still lag far behind their American counterparts in many cases, since agencies that use Amadeus and Galileo can't get the data they need to pass along.

"Everybody talks about the importance of information, but getting the right information in the right format is dirty work. It takes a lot of people demanding high standards and hours of programming," said Prism president Michael Whitesage. "But it really is seminal work. You can't consolidate purchasing data worldwide until everyone has the same data."

BTI, for example, scored a C+ score in the Prism ratings--but "they'd have a B+ if Galileo and Amadeus had the data elements to give them," Whitesage noted. "If we had the GDSs worldwide handing off those elements, the data at the agency level would be golden."

Prism's goal in Europe, as in the United States--and, one can assume in Asia--is to "open sources and standardize the flows of data from the global distribution systems to the agency back office to the customer," Whitesage said. "The GDS is the first source, so it starts there. What's not measured doesn't get done."

But Galileo vice president of corporate sales and marketing John Hach argued that "there are two separate issues involved here. Where we are in agreement is in support of opening database connectivity; we believe the customer is entitled to the data. But we also support an open data standard that is online and real-time, as opposed to something that requires export and import. Where Prism uses an ASCII file format, we are aspiring to something that's fully Open Data Base Connectivity (ODBC) compliant." In short, he added, "We're committed to working on giving the data to customers, but we want to do it in an open-standard platform.