Tech Cos. Turning Focus On Integrating With Outside Systems

Tech Cos. Turning Focus On Integrating With Outside Systems

By Cheryl Rosen

With the vast majority of their products' functionality already complete, online booking system companies are beginning to focus less on developing new capabilities and more on broader issues. Now that the systems work--and work in much the same way--the push has turned to the nitty gritty of integrating with travel agencies, suppliers, corporate financial and accounting systems, and even mobile phones and pagers.

Here's a roundup of what's new with the major online booking systems:

***

Amadeus's Corporate Traveller, a relative newcomer to the field, has taken root in Scandinavian soil, where it is being rolled out through Nyman & Schultz, a leading travel agency. Following what director of corporate communications Miguel Vermehren acknowledged was "quite a long pilot," the system is in use by 12 corporate customers with 10,000 travelers. Amadeus views the Scandinavian market, known for its high adoption of new technologies, especially wireless and e-commerce, "as a testing ground for quite a lot of more advanced features," Vermehren said.

Meanwhile, Amadeus also expects this to be a big year for the travel booking module it is supplying for SAP, the global enterprise resource system. Unconcerned that no clients have yet implemented it, Amadeus sees 2000 as a big year for the application, now that corporate IT departments have gotten past Y2K concerns. About 15 major corporations "are poised" to begin testing the product, Vermehren said, and the first customer implementation--at an as-yet-undisclosed corporation in Western Europe--is beginning now. Amadeus will receive half of annual license fees of $20 to $200 per user.

In preparation, Amadeus has been offering an SAP certification program to train travel agency IT specialists to install and implement the travel management module. European agencies Kuoni Travel and PUI already have been certified for what Vermehren called "a huge selling proposition for agencies: to have their staff trained and certified in both Amadeus and SAP."

But perhaps the most interesting development at Amadeus is its ITA software, "a whole new platform and Web interface that we'll be incorporating into a product for the corporate market by the third quarter," Vermehren said. The system, acquired last year by Amadeus, "replaces the knowledge of the travel agent with an interface that asks the traveler all the questions up front and then displays exactly what he needs." The software takes into account all the possible questions an agent might ask in the course of booking a reservation and downloads all the information onto a server up front, so any follow-up questions can be answered quickly.

Like Sabre, Amadeus has implemented "channel pricing," though not yet for the corporate booking system. "At the moment we've reduced the booking fee for bookings made on airlines' own Web sites by about $1.50," Vermehren said. "But that's not to say that we won't extend channel-based pricing to other distribution channels. We are considering a similar discount for Corporate Traveller."

***

At American Express, the focus appears to have shifted somewhat from the AXI system it co-developed with Microsoft to the GetThere.com system in which it invested last year. American Express has set up a beta customer on its "joint product with GetThere," which integrates GetThere's core functionality into the Amex back-end systems that handle quality control, preferred rates and a proprietary low-fare-search engine, said Nancy Fischer, vice president and general manager of interactive travel for American Express Corporate Services.

The beta customer first will test GetThere's functionality and then its integration with American Express support, before additional beta customers sign on in April. Then, "we expect to go nuts in June and July," Fischer said.

But that second step--the integration between the online booking system and the agency's existing process--is the real key to making the partnership work. At this point in the development of online booking, "the real hurdle for travel management companies has to do with being able to manage relationships from a customer-service standpoint," Fischer said. "If we are not issuing the tickets, it's a question of being able to develop a three-way customer-service relationship among us, the customer and the booking system. We need to be sure that when the PNR comes off that product, it works as smoothly as possible and there's as much automation as possible.

By the second release of the Amex version of GetThere, scheduled for fall, the focus will shift back to improving or changing some of the functionality, and an international version offering a choice of language and currency will debut.

Fischer insisted that despite the fact that the Microsoft/Amex co-development contract on the AXI booking system has ended, "our goal is to continue to support both products, so our clients have two choices of integrated, proprietary products. We don't have plans to phase out AXI Travel; that was not our plan when we entered into a relationship with GetThere. I still believe Expedia is the best product on the market, and we both are really proud of what we developed."

Indeed, AXI version 5.0 rolled out in December, adding international versions for the United Kingdom and Germany. Those versions use local language, currency, data and spelling. Previously, the system was available in five countries, but only in English.

While Amex "doesn't have an agreement right now" with Microsoft or Expedia to further develop AXI, "it is in discussion," Fischer said. In fact, "there's always the possibility" that American Express will integrate a third booking system, though Fischer said she is "not sure we'll see that in 2000."

Amex now has 250 customer sites using either AXI or GetThere, according to Fischer, and 500,000 registered users. For online booking, "1999 showed really good industrywide momentum due to changing business models, and I think 2000 is going to be the year we see real commitment from corporations and major growth," she said.

Much of that growth likely will be the result of unexpected reports of real savings on average ticket prices when travelers book online rather than call an agency (BTN, Feb. 21). American Express customers who carefully cross-checked average fares on the top 25 city pairs are seeing savings of up to 20 percent, Fischer said--"and that same number pops up in our own studies of 30 large companies. That's real information; our clients have gone in and done their own due diligence and support that number."

She attributes the savings to "the accountability issue: Travelers are booking more in advance and choosing to fly at different times and taking connections. It's not that they're getting lower prices in the system than an agent could get. It's not a faring issue. It's purely about travelers taking responsibility to hold down costs."

***

Galileo's Corporate TravelPoint, a private-label version of GetThere's Global Manager, is focusing on a switch to a structured data environment it hopes to make available during the second half of this year. Moving to structured data instead of "screen scraping" will improve the speed and accuracy of data transfers between the self-booking system and the GDS, said corporate sales and marketing vice president John Hach.

This month, Galileo also is rolling out its first customer test of a re-booking application that allows travelers to change their reservations through a pager or cell phone. In internal tests at Galileo with the Motorola PageWriter 2000X pager and Sprint PCS WAP-enabled devices, the application allowed Galileo employees to rebook itineraries in less than two minutes, Hach said. "If you're really running late, with this you can very discreetly change your reservation in the middle of a presentation and be virtually unnoticed by the people in the room," he noted. "And it's not a cumbersome application to learn. It's as easy as using voicemail."

With its two online booking products, Corporate TravelPoint for large corporations and Travelpoint.com for small ones, Galileo now has online corporate customers "in the hundreds--and we see 2000 as a year where many more corporate accounts are making decisions as opposed to evaluations of self-booking," Hach said. "Very quickly we've gone from the desktop to the laptop to the pervasive device--and the opportunity to perform a self-booking transaction is growing exponentially."

***

Not surprisingly for a company whose customers include 100 corporations with air volumes over $10 million and 4 million global travelers, GetThere.com is focusing this quarter on a single theme: integration.

Version 4.5 of GetThere's GlobalManager, released in January, includes a number of new features designed to bring together diverse pieces of the global travel purchasing and reporting pie, including different GDSs, new access devices, back-end expense reporting and direct connections to suppliers.

The new SuperSite module allows corporations that use more than one GDS or agency, or that have multiple divisions in multiple countries, to accommodate all the differing policies and preferred suppliers on a single site. "A lot of global corporations have no idea what's going on in Japan or in Africa, but this capability gives you a single point of management control and data gathering for the whole business with a single click," noted cofounder and chief technology officer Dan Whaley.

On the wireless front, GetThere in the fall introduced its Mobile Manager wireless service, partnering with Sprint PCS and Bell Mobility Canada so that travelers can access the system from an icon on the phone--and there are "more announcements to come," Whaley said. "This is a key part of our adoption strategy. An online booking system doesn't stop at the traveler's desk anymore; we've extended the desktop into their cell phones so they can continue to get service."

GetThere also is integrating its booking tool with leading automated expense reporting systems--including Ariba, Captura, Concur and Extensity--"to extend GlobalManager into the enterprise and integrate with other procurement technologies to form a living and breathing procurement network," Whaley said.

But the biggest development push, "on the order of 30 to 50 percent of the entire development effort of the company," is in the area of direct connections. "We don't have any announcement to make yet, but we already do direct connections for certain suppliers and understand that's the direction the industry will ultimately go," Whaley said. "So we are laying the groundwork for supplier-specific connections, and a tremendous amount of development to lay the basis for that capability."

***

Oracle E-Travel this week will release version 4.0, written entirely in XML, which rapidly is becoming the de facto standard language of the Internet. The new version will include significantly enhanced reporting information through E-Travel Intelligence, its hosted management reporting service. Several new reports are designed to provide information in an easy-to-understand and graphical manner. Exception reports, for example, now can be sorted by traveler, by reason or by cost center. "It's very powerful; it's right at your fingertips and it's available in real time," said product marketing director Rob Wald.

Also new in this release is an enhanced E-Travel Administrator module. Using the real-time, self-service model that online booking systems are taking to travelers, the new Administrator allows travel managers to access the module online and make their own changes to the system in real time.

In addition, a new integrated database of PNRs is designed to import reservations made through a travel agency and merge them with those made in E-Travel into a single database. The system can pull in data from multiple agencies and from all four GDSs, Wald said.

Other changes in version 4.0--including a redesigned user interface--are aimed at making the system easier to navigate and faster to use.

Oracle E-Travel also is looking at the mobile arena and moving to broad support of Internet-enabled devices, such as pagers and mobile phones. Travelers now can view and check flight schedules, book trips, produce driving directions and be notified immediately about flight changes and delays.

Continuing its focus on direct connections with suppliers, Oracle E-Travel this month added its first direct airline link, to Continental Airlines, and later this year will link to Amtrak as well with no GDS intermediary. E-Travel already has pipelines direct to Hertz Rent A Car and Pegasus, the hotel distribution company whose switch connects to all the major chains except Radisson.

"Everyone who is doing Hertz booking is communicating directly with Hertz--seeing what is in their corporate contract, not subject to misinterpretation by any intermediary," said Oracle E-Travel's marketing and business development vice president Bart Littlefield.

Oracle E-Travel also is involved in Oracle's growing focus on developing business-to-business e-commerce sites such as the huge Ford auto exchange. "One of the key things for the exchange sites is to have direct communication between the supplier and the customer, and we're beginning to work with them in a number of cases to provide the travel content," Littlefield said.

Indeed, agreed Wald, "An exchange is an online marketplace, a community of buyers and sellers where everybody benefits. It's about bringing together buyers and sellers directly--not just a front end to a global distribution system. And travel is the only player out there that's delivering on the concept of the exchange right now."

Even beyond the exchanges, though, Oracle E-Travel's appeal is in the tight integration it offers "covering the entire travel management footprint--with e-Traveler for booking, e-Travel Expense for T&E processing and e-Travel Intelligence for management reporting," Littlefield said.

***

Underscoring its "commitment to the online channel as a way of doing business that's efficient and good for everybody," Sabre has lowered by $1 the transaction fee it charges airline customers for reservations that come in through the Sabre BTS online booking system.

Internally, BTS is focusing less on features and more on the total travel transaction and service issues. "There's a lot of leapfrogging of new features out there, but what it's really coming down to is driving value for our customer base," said vice president of marketing and product development Pete Stevens. "We're getting laser-focused on value. We've automated the booking, and now we're looking for ways to continue to automate travel operations, drive more e-tickets and unique connections and get rid of some of the activities that aren't really a value-add."

Where most of Sabre's development work over the past four years has been focused on booking, "now we're working on business processes around specialized fulfillment. We want to drive down the blended cost of full-service and online tickets--and we believe we can get the cost of travel booking down under $10 over time, say by 2001 as a fair target," Stevens said.

Sabre already is piloting tests that look at fulfillment in a new way, focusing on how to make sure "everything is in sync" when a ticket is purchased over the phone and changed through the Internet, for example. "It's not a technology issue, but a question of how you set up an efficient process," said Stevens. "A lot of data errors in the PNR are created because agencies can't do good quality-control at the point of sale. Requests come through with notes attached, with data errors, with stuff that people forget to put in. But you can catch that stuff with online systems, so that just implementing an online tool eliminates a lot of back-office quality control and saves money."

In the online world, the point is to have "automated, highly focused ticket fulfillment integrated into the Sabre offering, so you can run a fully automated transaction that never is touched--and that's where we are trying to go," Stevens said. Sabre now is "going into pilot with a process that automates more than before," he added, but declined further comment.

Sabre BTS has 326 corporate customers and is adding between 10 and 20 a month.

On the reporting side, Sabre's Vantage Point in the next 30 to 60 days will debut a Web-based reporting tool with a data set that includes credit card and agency data. The company also is redesigning its corporate Web site to offer customer self-service "e-care." Over the next few months, the site will provide direct feedback, easy follow-up on customer service issues and benchmarking data for travel managers at companies using Sabre BTS.

***

As WTT becomes TRX (see story, page 20), the unit formerly known as TTG's development team is putting the finishing touches on version 6.0 of ResAssist, due for beta release in April and full distribution by the second quarter of the year. The new version will add Amtrak and Eurorail bookings, multilingual functionality (in French and Spanish, for now), trip templates and the ability to export itineraries into Outlook and other calendar programs. Also new is a feature that allows companies to put a tag in the profiles of high-level executives, and activates a warning when three or more try to book trips on the same flight.

But the biggest change to version 6.0 is one most users will not even notice, said TRX Technology Services general manager Steve Reynolds--a change in the basic architecture designed to "take advantage of direct connections to suppliers. We are wiring in any Web site our customers want to integrate into the travel booking process."

For now, that could mean, for example, a link from ResAssist to an airline's site to search for a lower fare, or to a site that offers weather or traffic reports. But at some point, "the next step will be to hit supplier sites directly and book in their internal reservation system," Reynolds said.

The April release will provide Internet-special fares by linking to the Web sites of American, Continental, Delta and United, Reynolds said. Rather than objecting to TRX passing along these specials to a larger audience, "the airlines are doing everything they can to get people to book online," Reynolds said. "As long as I'm not charging any sort of fee, they're thrilled."

TRX also is "rearchitecting the hotel booking process," merging its customers' corporate preferred databases with ResAssist so travelers see the preferred properties first. Travelers check off the properties that fit their needs, and the system then checks for availability. Only if the system fails to find an available room at a preferred property will it access the GDS.

ResAssist prices, meanwhile, remain flat, a result of "very little price pressure from customers." The pricing model is a one-time implementation fee and a flat $5-per-booking charge, which most travel agencies pass along in whole or in part to corporate customers.

ResAssist has more than 600 corporate customers, Reynolds said, and a significant new government one. Last month it signed the U.S. Department of Transportation, a $25 million air volume account in its own right, which also will make ResAssist available to all civilian and military employees on its FedTrip Web site. Also in the works is a Web-based meetings booking system, MeetingsAssist, scheduled for release in the second half of the year.

***

Like its competitors, Worldspan is seeing a "phenomenal growth rate" in TripManager usage in 2000 and big increases in adoption among its 891 existing customers.

Since buying the rights to the TripManager source code from TTG, the GDS can respond more quickly to customer requests for changes in its own version of the system, said Vela McClam Mitchell, Worldspan's staff vice president for e-commerce. One quick fix already added allows any travel administrator to delete a trip template as company travel patterns change. Another new development allows users to move from among the screens without losing the trip reservation they began filling out.

Worldspan also has moved some quality control to the point of sale, giving clearer instructions and more complete error messages on screen, so bookings do not go through unless all the necessary information is included. Also new is a quick printing feature that allows travel administrators to print just the itinerary screen, without the Web site graphics.

Addressing the needs of its most mobile users, Worldspan in mid-March will add a Schedule Change Advisory feature that will notify customer site administrators of airline schedule changes or flight delays. Corporations can elect to have the system automatically e-mail the message to affected travelers or have the travel office contact them. In the works, Mitchell said, is a "big push to cell phones."

***

Xtra On-Line Corp. this month released Schedules-by-Fares, which lists flight options and fare rules on a single screen so travelers can see all the choices and mix and match inbound and outbound flights. Drop-down boxes list all the flight legs available for each fare and the applicable fare rules. PowerTrip.com is used by more than 200 U.S. corporations, the company said.