US Airways Eyes Intranets
US Airways expects by this summer to upgrade its Corporate Travel Works booking software-in place with four beta testing customers-following internal testing after Galileo releases the new version to the airline next month.
US Airways managers would not describe what new features the second version has, but they did say the airline will respond to customer demand for an intranet platform rather than the original Windows NT, as well as the demand for an expense reporting module.
"There is a long list of desired features, and we won't be able to fulfill them all immediately," said Shafiq Khan, senior director of distribution planning. "I'm embarassed to say we didn't expect it to be this hard. When we went into this last year, there was little talk about intranets, and now it's a completely different game. For a holistic solution applying to the whole marketplace, we need to work with many platforms-it has defined our distribution strategy."
Khan said it was Columbus, Ohio-based Nationwide Insurance, the first corporate beta test site for CTW (BTN, Aug. 5, 1996), which pressed for an intranet solution only six months into the test. Nationwide is committed for a full rollout beyond the ongoing beta.
Additional lessons learned were that each company requires a unique solution and that in order to make the effort successful, corporations must be committed. "That sounds like motherhood and apple pie, but otherwise it won't work," Khan said.
As part of the airline's reengineering effort, it had aimed at rolling out the system with nine companies by January 1996. That number was cut to six following some difficulties with the technology, and of those, the initial results were mixed: Two of them, including Nationwide, were successful, two others were complete failures, and the remaining two, said Khan, "were where most companies will fall-in between."
He would not name participating corporations other than Nationwide, but said one of the two failures was out of the test within two weeks and the other in three months. The latter company, he said, "had a great travel manager who was very excited, but the work force wasn't in tune with working with technology."
All of these lessons have lengthened the process for the current tests as well as US Airways' future corporate installations. Still, for companies that "really have a vision and can make this happen, the travel manager will be more important than ever once they have these systems in because of the data they can capture," said Geoff Heuchling, the airline's manager of corporate marketing. "Over the next three to five years, and perhaps indefinitely, corporations have a reengineering task to overcome if they want to implement this kind of solution."
Addressing then-USAir's status as the launch supplier and customer for Andersen Consulting's Via World Network (BTN, Feb. 24), Khan said, "we've been in a small, self-contained pilot with their internal travel since November. There's no timetable on the test-we'll do it until we think we've learned enough-but the technology is doing very well.