Aqua, Navigant Hooking Orbitz
Chicago-based Orbitz, the airline-owned travel booking site, is beginning to strengthen its business-travel orientation via talks with Aqua Software, the agency automation provider owned by Denver-based mega agency Navigant International.
"Aqua is in the process of dotting the 'I's and crossing the 'T's on getting access to Orbitz fares," said Navigant president Thom Nulty. "Navigant will obviously be the first company to take advantage this. There will be some minimal fees associated with it."
An Orbitz spokesperson confirmed the talks, which are intended to address access to Web fares that are not in the global distribution systems, a contentious issue among travel buyers and, potentially, government regulators scrutinizing Orbitz. If finalized, the effort would not involve screen scraping, a practice employed by a number of Internet fare search tools now in use by the agency community.
"We're going to offer the fare search and let the agency make a booking on the desktop, not on the site," said Mark Ferguson, president of Santa Ana, Calif.-based Aqua Software, which will offer the service to other agencies as well as Naviagnt. Ferguson said one of the disadvantages of agents booking on Orbitz, which Aqua is attempting to address, is the inability for agents to use a corporate account's central-bill credit card--not to mention the inability to track those purchases. Asked about the status of the deal, Ferguson said, "We're through the big pieces and now down to lawyerese." Navigant's Nulty credited "the people at Aqua" with the idea, and Ferguson said it was executive vice president Sarah Campbell who came up with the concept.
Other travel agencies, notably Omega World Travel in Fairfax, Va., have expressed a desire to utilize Orbitz since it consolidates in one place the Web-only fares offered by airlines. Other consumer sites are beginning to strike deals with airlines for the same, and other travel distribution intermediaries--namely Sabre's GetThere subsidiary in Menlo Park, Calif., and Atlanta-based TRX--are on the cusp of expanding their capabilities to access inventory not found in the GDSs. "Direct connections are hot," said WorldTravel president Danny Hood.