BTI Americas' Portico Connects Apollo To Sabre BTS

<B> BTI Americas' Portico Connects Apollo To Sabre BTS</B>

By Cheryl Rosen

<I>Northbrook, Ill.</I> - As part of its distribution partnership with Sabre BTS, BTI Americas this month is rolling out an electronic link that will allow corporate customers to use the BTS booking system on the front end and the Apollo computer reservation system on the back. Before the year is out, BTI expects to launch a link to Worldspan, another Sabre competitor in the CRS market, as well.

With the Apollo link, a single corporation theoretically could use Sabre as its CRS for an eastern division and Apollo in the West, and have online reservations coming into BTI's Portico database from both.

"For now, we are the only agency that has done a joint development with BTS on this, putting our Apollo experts together with their programmers," said BTI Americas director of IT solutions Ellen Trotochaud. "We have a number of customers who want the BTS solution, but yet don't want to be tied into having to use Sabre as a CRS because they are Apollo or United customers. We wanted to provide the tools our customers are looking for and also support their choice of a CRS."

Trotochaud said two BTI customers this month are implementing the new Apollo-based BTS system, including a new corporate account that was drawn to the agency by its interest in the Sabre BTS booking system, but then switched its CRS account from Sabre to Apollo.

"With our headquarters being in Chicago (home to both Apollo and its majority owner, United Airlines), we hear a lot of interest in Sabre BTS from Apollo customers. The products out there from Apollo are just not the same as BTS. That's really why we put in the resources and helped drive the development of this," Trotochaud said. "Our whole intention in working with Sabre was to implement multi-CRS connectivity. We as an agency don't dictate which CRS our customers use, and we need to be able to provide a solution for them no matter what their choice."

Apollo's new alliance with Internet Travel Network (<I>BTN</I>, Feb. 23) "will help them with features for the traveler, but I don't think ITN's infrastructure is the same as BTS,' " Trotochaud added. "This stuff isn't just about the traveler--it's about supporting the travel management program and making sure the agency integration is there, so you can see a reservation whether it's made in the CRS or online. There needs to be a synchronization of the profiles and the reservations."

Links to other CRSs also are in the works, and BTI "is in the middle of a similar approach with Worldspan," Trotochaud said. And what about System One Amadeus, the only remaining U.S. CRS company without a link? "Worldspan is the only other project on the radar scope for 1998," she said.

Industry insiders agreed that Sabre's focus on allowing links to competing CRSs is probably a smart move in the changing world of electronic travel distribution, and follows Sabre's vision of itself as an independent technology provider that counts competitors of American Airlines, its sister AMR company, among its customers.

Said former Sun Microsystems travel manager Norm Rose, who now heads TravelTech Consulting of Belmont, Calif., "Sabre is trying to position BTS as an application that uses a CRS as a database, so it makes sense for them to develop an Apollo link. They think of themselves as independent software vendors, not just providers of mainframe transactions. They are looking at BTS as a standalone application--and Sabre has been ahead of the application development curve for some time.