<I>Swindon, U.K.</I> - Galileo International has begun the large-scale distribution of its Travelpoint automated booking system, aimed at unmanaged travelers, through its traditional global travel-agency distribution network.
In the long run, Galileo plans to offer a suite of automated products, including offerings aimed at the corporate and the family vacation markets, said David Near, Galileo subscriber marketing senior vice president. But in its first foray into the European and Asian markets, the decision was to target unmanaged corporate travelers, "whose demographics fit the technology of early adopters," Near said.
First shown in prototype at the Galileo customer conference in May (BTN, May 20, 1996), the diskette-based system was pre-released in late 1996 to the Danish market, where a PC-savvy user base "seemed to fit nicely," said Mike Montemurro, Galileo's vice president of agency sales and systems management. The product was then introduced to Galileo's National Distribution Companies in Asia in January, and in Europe in February.
In the North American market, Canada is in the final stages of preparing to deploy the product, and Apollo, Galileo's NDC in the United States, is looking at it, Montemurro said.
Travelpoint comes on a disk that travelers download into their PCs, and then use to access flight information from the Galileo host. Because frequent travelers have "zero tolerance for the unreliability of the public Internet," Montemurro said, bookings will go over the MCI Network in North America and the SITA network in the rest of the world. Reservations will fall into the queue of the traveler's preferred agency. The system can access corporate hotel rates, but not individually negotiated airfares, and it does not check reservations for corporate travel policy compliance.
Galileo decided to address the unmanaged travel market because that group "understands dial-up, is travel literate, and has PCs and modems," Near said. "We recognized very early on that this is a highly segmented market, and one of the things we focused on was an acute definition of who the customer is. The needs of the self-managed frequent traveler are very different from those of a traveler from a corporation with centralized control or those of a family going on vacation, and what we'll end up with is a suite of product offerings to meet the needs of each."
The CRS also is working on automated systems for managed corporate travelers, and tests of systems built by Galileo for several airline partners--including British Airways' Executive Travel Works, USAir's Corporate Travel Works and the United Corporate Connection--are proceeding in the United States and Europe. While "some customers like our first release well enough, and are using it today," Near acknowledged that work on an improved version "is in the works."
Near believes that despite the hot new technologies, there is no viable alternative for the traditional travel distribution system: from airline to CRS to agency to traveler.
"The technologies that enable direct links are here, and CRSs no longer are the only ones who can put together a network that connects buyers and sellers," he said. "But the question is why the alternatives offer more value than what we have today. Yes, there is a high degree of interest in intranet and browser-based solutions, and an almost universal interest in desktop systems, and we'll all be doing that in a very substantial way in 1997. But we've found virtually no corporations that want a divorce from their agency, and we think we still have the best value proposition for suppliers."
Meanwhile, Galileo this month published a new price list, which included price increases of about 3 percent for its airline customers. Near said the CRS recognized the need to be "sensitive to our customers' demands for a more cost-effective distribution system, and took a very cautious approach to raising prices so as not to encourage them to find alternatives." But at the same time, he cited the CRS' need for continuous investment in its own product.