Blackney's Back, Now As Worldspan CEO

<B> Blackney's Back, Now As Worldspan CEO</B>

By Cheryl Rosen

After a short hiatus from a lifetime in travel distribution, Paul Blackney is about to return to the helm of a GDS again, this time as CEO of Worldspan, effective Oct. 11.

The former president and CEO of Apollo Travel Services, Blackney was instrumental in founding Galileo International. He left Apollo when Galileo acquired it in July, 1997.

While his day job since then has been senior vice president of publishing and business services of the American Medical Association, Blackney also has kept his hand in travel e-commerce, serving on the boards of Xtra On-Line, Navigant International and priceline.com. And indeed, he already has a game plan for Worldspan in mind. "Really what we need to do is more of the same: enable travel transaction processing by professionals; provide hosting and airlines services--and hopefully we'll do more of that; and continue to develop services for the world of e-commerce," he said. "That's been the order of importance to us, and likely to remain the order for some time."

His time "outside the big corporate world" has been "very good for Paul Blackney as a manager," and reinforced his conviction that the travel industry "clearly leads the way in applying technology to business," he said.