Amadeus Prez Sees Tech Shifts
<H1>Amadeus Prez Sees Tech Shifts</H1>By Cheryl Rosen<H3>Tells ACTE Global Agencies, GDSs Must Reinvent Themselves</H3><I>Madrid </I>- If a revolution is, as José Tazón defines it, "a technology discontinuancy involving a shift of more than 50 percent," then the global travel distribution networks had better prepare for close-to-revolutionary times.
With information technology, telecommunications and cable television companies all setting their sights on the GDSs' domain, Amadeus Global Travel Distribution president Tazón predicted that travel agencies will see their share of the market cut by 40 percent-from the current 75 percent of all airline tickets to about 45 percent-in the next five years, unless they fight back to retain their market share.
Not only agencies but also GDSs will need to develop new business models, institute regulatory change to keep the playing field fair and expand their roles to become information providers to corporate customers, Tazón said.
Speaking at the Association of Corporate Travel Executives annual Global conference held here in Amadeus' home town, Tazón predicted that new media-including Internet and multimedia systems provided by agencies as well as by new players-will increasingly encroach upon the services agents traditionally have supplied to travelers.
To keep corporate customers' business, travel agencies will need to deepen their relationships and enable travel managers to make cost-effective decisions through the use of real-time, integrated data. In response to the growing challenge, Tazón said, Amadeus will take on the broader role of information provider to customers-a much easier change for the CRS to make than the one new players will have to go through to transform themselves into CRSs.
"We already have customer profiles, negotiated fares, pricing modules and the ability to display fares and to make 600,000 to a million fare updates daily," Tazón said. "The economies of scale of the CRSs are enormous. And I honestly don't see the viability of migrating all those functions upstream."
Amadeus senior marketing vice president David Jones said in an interview with Business Travel News that Amadeus will begin offering a six-module suite of automated travel booking, expense reporting and integration products to its travel agency customers by the first quarter of next year.
The system's Travel Arranger booking product will begin testing in October at about six U.S. and six European sites, probably in Scandinavia, France and Germany, Jones said.
Other pieces will include management reporting, expense reporting and customer profile modules, as well as modules designed to connect the suite of products to other systems. The expense reporting system will begin testing in early 1997.
Moving from its earlier development model based on the OS/2 system, Amadeus is now standardizing on Microsoft Windows 95 and Windows NT platforms, and using a new set of internal standards code-named "Mimosa."
With development progressing in Miami and Nice, France, and soon in Frankfurt as well-and with the new architecture meant to plug into internal agency and corporate systems-"we need to have clear standards," Jones said.
Jones said the integration of System One's and Amadeus' systems, which began when the companies merged, will be "largely behind us in 1997, and certainly by the end of the year we'll be able to shed the costs of using two data centers by closing the one in the United States."
The company's new product development will focus on "products that help agencies manage corporate products," and the addition of new categories of providers in the CRS, including railways, tour operators and destination products, Jones said. By the end of the first quarter, for example, the Amadeus system will offer access to French railway SNCF, allowing automated booking of tickets.
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Speaking on a panel on travel technology, Swedish Management Group travel manager Annika Ortmark said that her company's internally built expense reporting system has allowed for the internal relocation of 14 of the 15 employees who previously handled T&E reimbursement. The system allows travelers to file expense reports by telephone and scan receipts into the company's headquarters in Stockholm.
Because the company, like most Swedish firms, reimburses based on per diems, travelers need only fill in the dates of travel; the system figures out the per diem based on the country they are traveling in, does the currency conversions and deposits the reimbursement in the traveler's bank account. Ortmark is shopping around for an automated booking system as well.
On the same panel, Merck & Co. global procurement manager Ronald Liebscher reported that he has rolled out an "acceptance test" of Rosenbluth International's E-Res automated booking system to 50 employees. Eighty percent of users are accepting the first itinerary the system offers, Leibscher said, and a dedicated support staffer is spending about 19 hours a week on the project.