Sabre Travel Network this week announced its plans to release its a profile management system, to which the company will begin migrating its travel management company clients from its existing Stars profile platform in April. Meanwhile, other GDS providers also are working to roll out new profile systems.
New features include better search and display functions, including the ability to locate a corporate traveler's profile without knowing its attached corporate account, and the display of traveler preferences, corporate hierarchy and supplier loyalty program affiliations on the original profile screen. Sabre's new profile system will serve as the foundation for a new corporate travel policy engine currently under development.
Sabre's initial release is free. Next year, it will release new at-cost services and tools, including data and reporting tools and a Web-based portal. The first phase will have 1,600 data elements and be available in three languages.
According to Sabre product marketing manager Brad Bennett, PowerPlus Profiles has been in development for more than a year. Some large corporate clients and travel management companies have been testing the technology since November.
Travelport GDS in the second quarter plans to begin beta-testing its new profile system based on acquired technology from G2 SwitchWorks with a more general rollout later this year, according to Travelport GDS group vice president and head of products and services Neal Sunners.
Amadeus last year began building customized GDS-independent profile systems in 15 languages for travel management companies, based on its core airline IT profile technology in use for several years, said Amadeus Americas regional director of travel technology Sebastien Gibergues.
All of the next-generation profile management systems that the global distribution systems are building use open, Web-enabled, configurable architectures that sit outside of the GDS-host environments and provide agents and corporations with more flexibility in managing their traveler data.
In addition, the new systems use graphical user interfaces that further pull the agent off the traditional green-screen, coded environment and mirror the look of the new point-of-sale agent desktops planned to hit the marketplace this year
(BTNonline, Aug. 11, 2008). Profile information also can be transferred to new passenger name records, keeping reservations consistent, reducing reservation processing and enabling quick builds of group bookings.
With the move off of the GDS-host mainframes and into relational databases, agents can pool profiles and transfer data from multiple information systems to create master profiles that will serve as the starting point of the reservation process on the front end. On the back end, the migration away from the legacy, cryptic environments permits the free flow of profile data to integrate with online booking tools, corporate payment systems and human resources databases, which often carry redundant profiles for the same employee.