Booking Vendors Update Tools

<B>Booking Vendors Update Tools</B>

By Jay Campbell

In an online booking industry that continues to compete as much for attention as it does revenues, vendors again took the opportunity at the National Business Travel Association convention to announce a slew of updates and other news.

Start-up venture Highwire teamed with booking engine provider ITA Software, and Carlson, Galileo and OAG each introduced entirely new product lines. E-Travel focused on "enterprise travel management," while Sabre BTS added access to American Airlines' AAirpass program. ResAssist and Trip Manager also were updated.

Although the top corporate booking providers have a substantial share of the largest accounts, Carlson, Galileo, Highwire and OAG join a number of start-up and established tech vendors still seeking a claim in the marketplace. Much of the market is yet untapped, and buyers at large accounts are known to have switched vendors. Indeed, some still are looking at new products even after well-publicized rollouts.

Galileo's new product--which has a rollout deadline for the first quarter of 2001 that one industry observer called "ambitious"--now is a "comprehensive prototype" and will enter market trials with clients later this year. Called Corporate Travelpoint, the first version of the software was developed by GetThere Inc.

Galileo touted a number of advanced features in Travelpoint, including a central, real-time "data store" for travel policies and traveler profiles that "eliminates the need for data synchronization across multiple channels." The store supports reservation changes via the GDS, Web or wireless devices by travel managers, agents or authorized travelers.

The system will integrate with enterprise resource planning software to prepopulate employee profile information from human resources. The use of Extensible Markup Language technology will improve response times and allow for more complex transactions, Galileo said.

Worldspan also issued several announcements, most notably a lower segment fee for airlines that promote its Trip Manager booking product (see story, this page). Trip Manager also took on a new look and a tool to automate the creation of traveler profiles. The latest version of Trip Manager, 6.0, allows customers to assign priority numbers for contract hotels, to deactivate contracts without removing hotels from the system, then re-activate them when desired, and to choose whether to see the hotel list with available rooms or all hotels regardless of availability.

Trip Manager 6.0 also offers a new coin graphic on the hotel list to indicate rate ranges for properties without contracted rates, full addresses for properties on the hotel list, including street, city, state and zip code, and last seat availability for a "larger number of airlines."

Broadening its strategy to what it called "enterprise travel management," E-Travel revealed a number of planned enhancements to its E-Traveler booking product, including an updated reporting function, integration with human resources systems and browser-based access to profiles and bookings for travel agents. The features will be developed over the next few weeks, said spokesman Rob Wald.

Meanwhile, E-Travel announced the Internet Business Trip, which offers corporations travel planning, purchasing, tickets and e-mailed itineraries for a transaction fee as low as $16.95. Asked which fulfillment providers E-Travel is using, Wald said, "We have a lot of travel agencies as part of the E-Travel marketplace providing these services. The agency partner you get depends on what segment of the market you are, based primarily on volume."

The company also unveiled pre-trip approval using Oracle Workflow, which alerts managers to exception conditions that need immediate attention. Wald in late July said the Workflow service would be available "in a matter of weeks."

The updated Web-based reporting tool called E-Travel Intelligence is powered by Oracle's Discoverer software. When released in 30 to 60 days, it will allow ad-hoc analysis of itinerary and charge card data in 25 different standard reports. Later, it will incorporate meetings spend.

Seattle-based Highwire, a travel agency-owned booking system now in beta test with "several" clients, including Amazon.com, said it will license a faring engine provided by ITA Software. ITA is one of a handful of companies, including the GDSs, to download fares directly from ATPCO, to which airlines file fares three times daily. ITA then processes the data on a personal computer, offering users fare and availability information simultaneously, "without the mistakes of a mainframe environment," said ITA product manager Michael Randall. ITA recently expanded to the international market its licensing agreement with Amadeus in the United States. In June, it won a contract to power the Orbitz airline site.

Highwire's cofounder, Marka Jenkins, also is the president and CEO of Metropolitan Travel in Seattle. She said the first stage of integration with ITA will begin during the fourth quarter. "We've set up a licensing relationship, primarily to solve the negotiated fare issue," said Jenkins. Version 1.5 of the system will be complete by mid-August.

Amazon.com travel manager and accounts payable supervisor Karin Hutchinson said her company is "working closely with Highwire in helping to build the system," which should cut Amazon's transaction costs in half.

Born in late 1999, Highwire is part-owned by Galileo International and used Galileo's XML Select structured data interface to build a reservations engine.

Sabre BTS said it is the first booking system to make available American Airlines' AAirpass program. Popular with the banking community, AAirpass allows corporate clients to buy 25,000 flight miles a year for two- or five-year terms (BTN, Sept. 6, 1999). Now, in BTS, AAirpass clients can compare the offering with AA's regular fares. American has been aggressive in selling more AAirpass programs, said BTS senior vice president and general manager Scott Smith.

TRX's ResAssist version 6.0 added Amtrak and Canada's Via Rail to its database, allowing users to compare train options with air options. The update also included additional hotel preferencing mechanisms and an "industry first" that allows travel managers to track the number of company executives on a given flight.

OAG, meanwhile, launched its "first offensive" in the "e-travel" arena--including OAG Mobile, an airline information and notification service for Web-enabled wireless devices--and plans later this year to partner with a "leading tech provider" on a corporate booking tool.

Carlson Wagonlit Travel introduced a proprietary booking product, the latest enhancement to its Traveler Service System. Carlson is not marketing the product separately as a free-standing tool, but it will be available to all customers of its Client Care Network.