<H1> BTN.COM</H1>Sabre Goes Cyber...
<B>Sabre's</B> March 12 launch of its Travelocity Web site offered an interesting view of the travel information and booking opportunities quickly popping up on the Web, and what corporate travel managers are up against in maintaining control of travelers' decisions. The site (http://www.travelocity.com) offers unbiased bookings in real time; an "intelligent" search engine that will offer "the best" options according to the traveler's preferences by price, carrier or time; airline seating charts; 200,000 pages of destination information and videos including 10,000 restaurants and 13,000 golf courses; street maps; and live chat areas in which users can send questions to local experts around the world.
The site allows travelers to reserve a seat without ticketing, to change the reservation until the ticketing date and to have the ticket overnighted or sent to an agent or airline office. It also offers 500 frequent flyer miles for every American or United ticket booked online.
At a press preview of the system at New York's Cyber Cafe, Sabre Group president Michael Durham said the group will continue to focus on building "unbiased products in all three channels: the consumer-direct, the corporate-direct and the travel agency-direct."
...And So Does AT&T
<B>AT&T</B> has announced two new services: an Internet hosting service that will help companies design and manage homepages, and an Electronic Commerce Solutions platform that can take customer orders by fax, phone or private online network and merge them into a single database.
Aimed at medium-sized companies that don't have large call centers, the latter service already has been adopted by Outrigger Hotels of Hawaii. The company now accepts orders from its 30,000 travel-agent customers via fax, phone or PC, faxes a confirmation and enters the data into a database, all without human intervention. By next year, Outrigger's Electronic Commerce database also will be linked to the Internet.
Electronic Maps
<B>GeoSystems</B> of Lancaster, Pa., has launched an interactive Web site (http://www.mapquest.com) that allows users to access detailed maps and information on a specific street address. For travel managers building travel homepages on internal "intranets," the company also offers hyperlinks, customized maps and driving directions for annual fees ranging from $5,000 to $30,000, based on transaction volume.
booking demo
<B>New Media Solutions</B> is doing a formal "proof of concept" demonstration of a system that allows travelers at "one of the top 10 corporate accounts" to look up availability and make bookings directly into a CRS through an agency's World Wide Web page. According to Rock Blanco, a principal at the Medfield, Mass.-based software company, the application can be customized to corporate travel policy.
ITTA "Loses" Its Independence
The <B>Independent Travel Technology</B> <B>Association</B> is dropping its "I" and allowing full membership by CRSs, who heretofore were allowed only allied membership. At the same time, incoming ITTA president Tim Moore of <B>Teletec Inc.</B> in Ambridge, Pa., welcomed travel managers who are knowledgeable about technology issues to join the association, which offers educational programming.