Travelport GDS today announced the acquisition of some of G2 SwitchWorks' "software assets and intellectual property," which it plans to use to develop a multi-global distribution system point-of-sale agent desktop application to replace the Galileo FocalPoint/ViewPoint and Worldspan Go solutions, beginning in early 2009.
The new software would simplify the GDS user interface, making it unnecessary for agents to know GDS-specific coding, thus driving down labor and operational costs.
In addition, Travelport's point-of-sale solution will deliver a new airline retailing platform for merchandizing, upselling and unbundling products and services, similar to the platform Amadeus unveiled this week
(BTNonline, April 3). According to Travelport GDS CIO Sue Powers, some of these features will be launched with the point-of-sale application in early 2009, with some even sooner in Travelport GDSs.
"When an agent is looking at a cryptic format, it really doesn't speak well to being able differentiate your product through distribution," said consultant Norm Rose, president of Belmont, Calif.-based Travel Tech Consulting. "Having a more flexible, open platform that G2 is providing means that there is a lot more merchandizing that will happen at the desktop of the agent that will hopefully be in line with what the corporate travel manager wants and what the TMC wants, and ultimately it can also benefit the supplier as well."
The deal includes G2's not-yet-released Kestrel point-of-sale application, its corresponding Web services platform, software development tools and automated business rules engine, which will drive the integration of the Apollo, Galileo and Worldspan GDS systems. Travelport also acquired both a traveler profile database and a universal records database residing outside of the GDS that will integrate GDS and non-GDS content and online booking tool reservation data, according to Powers.
"One of our key strategies is for our customers to be able to access those three GDS cores from a common worldwide desktop," said Powers. "We also plan to bring in access to other GDS systems outside of the three that we own."
Other GDS software assets, such as G2's GDS bypass and alternate content aggregation systems, were not purchased, including its current point-of-sale application G2 Agent. GDS would not disclose financial details of the acquisition. Travelport also will hire some of the G2 Kestrel development team.
Travelport will make the new agent desktop using G2's Kestrel as its foundation into an off-the-shelf product for agencies that will hold traveler profile and passenger name records databases outside of the GDS, Powers said. In theory, this will increase agent efficiency and reduce cost as agents no longer will need to learn multiple GDS codes.
While Travelport's new solution aims to drive down costs, the infrastructural change to support multisourced transactions can help drive corporate travel policy management, Rose said. "You have to be able to do some type of behavioral change management at the traveler level and self-booking tools have done a great job in doing this," he said, "but there is still a large portion of reservations that go through a call center and the way the GDS has handled them with the profiles, policy and reason codes has been a very archaic process for point-of-sale policy enforcement. It lends itself to an environment that is not as strong as a self-booking side."