Cos. Seek To Synch Traveler Data

<B>Cos. Seek To Synch Traveler Data</B>
<I>New Online Booking Rollouts Raise Profile Synchronization Issues</I>

By Cheryl Rosen

Spring is the traditional time for getting one's house in order, and travel insiders are suggesting the best spring cleaning project for the year 2000 might well be a review of corporate traveler profile databases.

Indeed, many say, the hundreds of corporations heading toward online booking rollouts this year will need to sweep the dust off their traveler profiles quickly. If not, the issue of synchronizing the separate databases of information on travelers--at the agency, the GDS and the corporation itself--with a new booking system could become an unexpected stumbling block that delays deployment and alienates early adopters.

"Profile synchronization is the underwear that nobody wants to talk about, because everyone has their own agenda," said one global travel manager, who discovered only two days before a scheduled rollout of Global Manager that the encrypted profiles she had sent GetThere could not be loaded automatically into the GDS and the Carlson Wagonlit external database. "At rollout, we had to take a Band-Aid approach, sending e-mails to update the proprietary database at the agency." The corporation still is using a manual update process and, "it's going to take the better part of a year to pull it all apart and make GetThere the repository," the travel manager said. "It's a three-way synchronization, and my IT people are leading the effort."

Dorian Stonie, whose successful launch of GetThere's online booking at VeriFone recently led him to do the same at Hewlett-Packard (<I>BTN,</I> April 3), agreed that the trend among the large agencies to move profiles out of the GDS and into separate databases is having unforeseen consequences.

"Purchasing the system was the easy part," Stonie said. "I had a vision of one online system and a perfect world, but I found there were a lot of complexities we didn't foresee--and synchronizing with the agency's offline database was one thing that proved more difficult than I'd anticipated. Over the past few years, the concept was that having a database outside the GDS would give you more flexibility. But in terms of online booking, it's an added level of complexity."

When it came time to load traveler profiles into the online system at VeriFone, Stonie found "a large percentage of them hadn't been updated in years." Rather than download incorrect information from the agency, he chose the old-fashioned way of doing it: He had travelers load their own current information directly into the booking system, then downloaded the data.

Even in retrospect, Stonie thinks the solution was satisfactory: "Starting from scratch is the best way to get the most current information, but it's an ongoing issue to keep the databases in synch."

At Sony Music Entertainment Inc. in New York, on the other hand, senior director of travel administration Howard Brooks tried to spare his travelers the onus of extra work by having the travel department do it for them. But that approach, too, proved bumpier than expected. "We had an in-house person create a new profile for each traveler and physically input it in Sabre," Brooks said. "But a few were missing, and our agency said it could add them to the database. Instead, the agency overwrote everything with the data it had from two years ago, and we were back where we had started."

His advice? "When you're trying to sell an online booking system, you want everything to be 100 percent correct. So, I wouldn't trust an agency to download profile data. It's worth employing temps to do it for you--whatever it takes--to not give people an excuse to not use the system."

Ingersoll Rand travel manager Marian Shapiro took a third route, outsourcing the synchronization of profiles among the company's human resources, ERP, travel agency and online E-Travel system to third-party provider InnoSys Inc. of Richmond, Calif.

"We don't have a packaged product or software, but we do things like this on a contract basis when data needs to be extracted from a database and handed off, where a corporation is switching agencies or GDSs, for all sorts of reasons," said InnoSys president Mike Ridenhour. "Basically, the corporation allows us access to their profiles stored on the CRS and we write the software program to do the necessary extraction or modification. We've done this quite a bit for American Express and its corporate customers."

Dell Computer Corp. is outsourcing a nightly profile synchronization to its agency, Maritz Travel, which takes an automated feed from Dell's HR database. But Julie Thomte Rabern, Dell senior manager of global travel, considers it "a short-term" fix. "I knew ahead of time it was going to be an issue. Nobody had the functionality to offer, and we felt we had to have it flawless before rolling out the online booking system," she said. "Part of the planning process was to create 30,000 profiles, build the HR feed and get those all in place prior to the rollout. From a data integration standpoint and a customer experience standpoint, it had to be operational before deployment. If travelers were to go to the URL and not find their profiles, that would not be a positive first experience."

But in the longer term, Dell plans "to bring the profiles in house and own them ourselves. Our goal is to make the BTS profile the master and Sabre the slave. There's a lot of prework that has to be done to make sure the agency profiles are in the proper format."

That's easier to accomplish at a computer company like Dell, where Rabern has a team of two full-time and three part-time IT staffers "where I pay a portion of their salary to support the travel program globally." Dell also asks its travelers to update their own profiles in BTS, "but there's additional data that we wouldn't want the traveler to enter, like hierarchy and division information."

Indeed, as Thomte mulls expanding online booking to Europe and Asia, it's the profile synchronization issue that is slowing her down. "I had hoped to do Europe this year, but I guess I'd say if I get the U.K. done I'd be happy, and a lot of it has to do with the profile synchronization piece. On a global level, it's even more challenging. I'd probably be happy with a weekly feed in Europe, but it's very difficult to drive the efficiencies as long as you have a lot of manual intervention."

But where there's a customer with an issue, there's also a supplier working on a solution. For instance, GetThere's first profile synch product, launched in 1998, links the online system with the GDS. A second, Single Sign-On--launched last year--connects to the customer's HR database, checking travelers as they log on to be sure they have a current profile.

"Profiles are traveler information, and so they are important to the customer," said GetThere co-founder Dan Whaley. "The problem is that there are essentially four copies of the data: in the online system, the agency, the GDS and the corporation itself. If you draw a hub-and-spoke picture, you see we need three separate interfaces."

Said GetThere's Tim Ring, "Carlson Wagonlit has to unravel some stuff and GetThere has to come up to the plate with an XML solution, so Carlson can pull data from GetThere, which now is not possible." But it soon will be. A third GetThere product announced last month will use the new XML-based profile data standard of the OpenTravel Alliance (<I>BTN,</I> March 20) to do just that.

At E-Travel, long a proponent of open systems and direct connections with suppliers, president and CEO John Ackermann agreed that the profile synch issue "is an artifact of the past we have to live with a little longer. It's too important to ignore, but loading all the information in one place and integrating it is difficult, primarily on the agency side. It would be a lot easier if you could just take the agency profile out of the GDS and put it on the screen, but there can be stuff the agency doesn't want customers to see. That's why XML is so important. The quicker we move to a standard, the better."

Worldspan also is on the case. The first phase of its profile synch project, already available, enables a one-time download of Worldspan World Files to create the Trip Manager profiles for new accounts, said spokeswoman Patricia Forsythe, and a second phase that will link the HR database feed and real-time synchronization of World Files and Worldspan Trip Manager profiles is in the works.

Sabre, too, is working on solutions. "Our data synchronization product has been able to keep that stuff in synch for quite a while, unless the agency doesn't have structured data and will not change its process," said Pete Stevens. "If everyone uses a relational database, it shouldn't be a problem."

And, indeed, even if the agency database is unstructured, the March 31 release of Sabre BTS is a solution, Stevens said. "We've enhanced the ability to download data out of an unstructured database, put them through an intelligent system that restructures them, and put the structured data back into the GDS. We call it 360 load, 180 real-time synchronization." Still, it's not easy, he acknowledged. "It's a complex issue because it's a mix between business practices and technology, and while our new enhancement is significant, it still requires some change. It's my understanding that Carlson is further along than many agencies."

The best possible solution, in Stevens' opinion, is to ban agents from making profile changes in the GDS, where the freeform nature of the space makes it more difficult to control errors. "The mega agencies have invested a lot in their offline databases, and it's easier to compare and match data in them. We recommend that updates be made in a relational database, like a booking tool or agency database, and not in the GDS, so you can control the data entry. I prefer to never touch another GDS if I can help it.