Amadeus, System One Clients Will Get Global Platform

<H1>Amadeus, System One Clients Will Get Global Platform</H1><H3>By Cheryl Rosen</H3>New York - Unison, the new consolidated platform from System One and Amadeus, will soon offer more vendors and more online applications for corporate travelers.

All System One and Amadeus customers will be converted to the new global res system by the end of 1997, at no cost to the agencies involved other than the time they'll need to spend in training.

At a press conference honoring their first anniversary as a couple, Amadeus and System One said the conversion of System One customers in South America to the new global platform is already half complete. Through year-end 1997, all other travel agencies will be shifted.

Amadeus has invested 312 man-years of time in its new system and $120 million in the software alone, according to senior marketing vice president David Jones. The changes-including intelligent PNRs, logical language and a fully integrated database of negotiated fares that resides directly in the CRS-have cut the number of transactions an agent must go through by 30 percent per booking.

Jones declined to specify which agencies will come next on the conversion time line, but said large agencies with a lot of international requirements might be done first.

Amadeus credits the transition to a global system with a number of recent marketplace victories, including contracts naming Amadeus the preferred CRS of three American consortia: Woodside Travel Trust, SRG International and the Riverside Travel Group.

In addition to improved agent productivity, the new system offers an increased number of vendors. In the past, "since System One was overwhelmingly U.S. and Amadeus was overwhelmingly European, many smaller vendors didn't feel it necessary to be in both," Jones said. The global system will offer U.S. agents access to European railroads for the first time, as well as 55 car rental companies instead of the previous 11, and 50 percent more hotels.

Even while developing the global CRS product for its agency customers, Amadeus is joining the great migration toward offering online applications by rolling out its automated product for the corporate market, Travel Management Solutions. Travel Arranger, an automated booking system that filters itineraries through corporate travel policy, will debut by year's end; reporting and expense reporting modules will follow in late 1996 and 1997. "While in Europe we'll always work with a travel agency, in the U.S. it's much more realistic to go right to large corporates with this product," Jones said.

While Jones stressed that the company had no plans to develop a direct booking capability that does not require the intervention of a travel agency, he announced two products-one that seems to underline the commitment to the agency distribution channel and one that does not.

This summer, the CRS' OneLink World Wide Web site will allow browsers to book air tickets through System One agencies only; hotel and car rental capabilities will be added by fall. Amadeus also plans an as-yet-unnamed travel "mall" on the Web that will offer a series of "storefronts" by individual airlines, hotels and car rental companies in which travelers can browse and book direct. On that site, booking through an Amadeus agent will be offered, but not required.

Amadeus also will build a disk-based booking product for Continental Airlines that will be mailed out monthly to its frequent fliers starting in July, much like United Airline's Corporate Connection.

Asked how long, in a continuum of two to 10 years, he thinks it will be before the industry sees significant market share going through direct bookings, Jones said he "tends to be at the slow end of the spectrum." Direct booking "is a major trend that will take its share of the market," he said. "But it's overhyped.