<H1>Apollo Targets Agencies</H1><H2>Agency personnel is a key cost</H2><H3>By Cheryl Rosen</H3><I>Rolling Meadows, Ill. </I>- Apollo Travel Services last week leaped into the automated-booking fray, announcing that by year-end it will offer an easy-to-use, point-and-click system aimed not at corporate travelers but at the agents who service them.
Called Millennium 3, the system promises to simplify the booking process for both trained and unskilled agents, saving hundreds of hours in training time and costs by allowing people to communicate with airline reservation systems in plain English rather than in arcane codes.
"One of the key components of agency cost is personnel," said marketing and sales senior vice president Lynne Rosenbaum, and Apollo's goal is to offer a product that restores agents' role to that of salespeople, "allowing them to concentrate on the customer, not on formats."
In addition to saving money for the agency, Millennium 3 should contribute savings to the CRS' own bottom line by reducing its staffing and training needs. Last year, Apollo's toll-free help-desk operators fielded over a million format-related questions, at an average duration of five minutes apiece, and the company hosted 18,000 attendees at free training classes to drill codes and formats into their heads.
Millennium 3 is a 32-bit, Windows 95-based application that requires a 486 workstation with 16 megs of RAM. While "the hardware is going to clearly be more expensive," Rosenbaum noted, "the cost-benefit ration will be demonstrable."
In addition to allowing agents to click on car, hotel and airline choices, the system also performs some quality-control tasks at the point of sale. The system warns an agent when reservations are made outside of a traveler's corporate policy, when the traveler's corporate credit card is about to expire or when a piece of the reservation is missing.
Said one beta tester, Diane Sullivan of Mutual Travel in Seattle, "Agents get bogged down in tasks, and we need to get back to the point of sale. I think the system will offer flexibility to our consultants and make them more productive and less stressed."
Another beta user, Sarah Henshall, vice president of travel and branch operations at AAA Carolinas in Charlotte, N.C., had an even broader goal. With the automobile club's chain of 24-hour emergency help desks already operating nationwide to service stranded motorists, AAA plans to cross-train staffers on the Millennium system and have them handle travel itinerary changes for agency customers.
On TravelPro, an online Bulletin Board/Forum for travel agents, feedback for the concept was mixed. "While most of us have managed to learn the arcane commands of the CRSs, it's expensive, and most agencies are too busy for much training," said Lenora Porcella at Computerized Travel of San Jose, Calif. "I'm not convinced that point-and-click is going to satisfy them unless the software solves the crashing troubles we've all experienced."
The similarities between the Millennium 3 interface and that of systems aimed directly at corporate travelers also beg the question of whether travelers need an agent at all. But Rosenbaum said that focus groups of travelers and travel arrangers like to look up travel options on automated systems, but still prefer to have an agent make the booking.
Travel industry consultants agree that it will take some time before self-booking systems gain the confidence of corporate travelers. Said John Caldwell, of Washington, D.C.-based Caldwell Associaties, "Travel arrangers tell me they are going into the Internet and getting availability before they call their agency, but whether they will go the next step and be responsible for the actual booking is another question."
But John Ackermann, president of E-Travel Inc. of Concord, Mass.-whose automated booking system this month is being deployed at "a major financial institution in the Boston area"-said that while his experience reflects Caldwell's view, "follow-up calls to the agency diminish quickly when travelers see that the system really works.