<B>E-Bookers Going Global</B>
By Jay Campbell
<I>Chicago - </I>Electronic booking vendors are lining up to penetrate the global corporate travel market, starting with Europe, faster than you can say "book it" in any language. In fact, language is a big challenge, but one that booking vendors--like their peers in T&E and other enterprisewide software--expect to overcome.
The list of recent developments is dizzying: France's KDS Travel earlier this month agreed to help Blue Bell, Pa.-based Unisys Corp. enhance its Unisys E-@ction travel res solutions for international and multinational corporations; Menlo Park, Calif.-based GetThere will announce it has extended its system to Europe with a new version that incorporates French and German; and Spain's Amadeus, Scandinavian airline SAS and telecommunications company NetCom last week announced plans to jointly develop a new electronic travel marketplace for both business and leisure travelers in the Nordic region.
Meanwhile, AirPlus Business Systems, vendor of Lufthansa's UATP card, plans to introduce in the United States an electronic booking system by January after the company finalizes contracts with GDSs here. The system is "up and running" in Europe, said national director of USA sales Sam Vaishnav, based in East Meadow, N.Y. Vaishnav could not name how many clients are using the system, which AirPlus developed internally in Frankfurt.
Germany's I:FAO, meanwhile, in September completed the merger of it's two North American subsidiaries, Quixdata Systems Inc. and I:FAO of North America Inc. I:FAO considers itself the market leader in Europe, where more than 300 customers use its Cytric booking system.
E-travel is working through currency issues, date and time formats, tax, ticketing and tariff issues and developing a far broader database of airport codes and formats for its "internationalization" effort, which will be rolled out early next year, according to Bart Littlefield, E-Travel vice president of marketing.
After achieving 50 percent savings in its first year of usage, Citigroup this summer selected Sabre BTS for a global rollout. "Deploying Sabre BTS globally provides us with a common travel platform across multiple business units and locations," said Mary Kay Bellersen, vice president of global procurement services at Citigroup. But some buyers are testing the global waters with caution.
"It will take a long time to roll out globally because it's taking more time than we expected to roll out our agencies," said Jim Lennon, global travel leader at PricewaterhouseCoopers. PwC is on the verge of choosing GetThere or Sabre BTS after a long selection process.
"There were more issues than we had anticipated, but we decided to review the biggest names in the business with the most global reach," said Lennon. "We figure that by the time we're ready to go global, they will be as well. It would be nice to have one product worldwide, but we don't have one agency worldwide nor one GDS, so we'll see." PwC plans to start by implementing in English-speaking countries first.
GetThere's international effort, to be announced this week, is based on demand from about a dozen clients who are going global, according to a company spokesman. GetThere called itself "the first global vendor to develop features within its booking tool that allow for the appropriate language, currency and calendar dates of a respective region to be displayed, while also providing up-to-date access to schedules and negotiated rates with European carriers."
During BTN's Travel Technology World conference here earlier this month, Unisys announced that through the new partnership with KDS, it will offer corporations a private-label version of the KDS Wave product, which can handle multiple languages, currencies and GDSs, and international fares.
Wave, which has "numerous multinational" customers in Europe, was demonstrated at TTW by Soren Schodt, managing director of the Danish Travel Pool consortium (BTN, Dec. 7, 1998). "In 1995, Travelpoint failed; in 1997 to '99, another effort failed; and in 1999, we chose ITN/GetThere, but we couldn't wait for them to get there," joked Schodt. "We then signed a new contract with KDS and one month later had a full rollout. They are service-minded and flexible, with a European commitment."
According to Houston-based consultant Grant Caplan of Consulting Strategies, "The KDS components are robust with a different look. It's European-centric, which is nice for organizations that have cross-cultural needs. The PNR replicator is really good--you can drag and drop a PNR from one GDS to another in Windows."
In the Nordic region, the new venture by Amadeus and SAS will be called Nordic Travel Hub. Expected to launch during the first half of 2001, NTH is set up as an "independent company" owned jointly by SAS, Amadeus and NetCom. "Nordic Travel Hub will focus on both consumers and businesses, primarily within the Nordic region, offering tailor-made solutions and features to each," said Philippe Chérèque, Amadeus senior vice president of corporate strategy. Such solutions would include "advanced travel management functions" for companies and "state-of-the-art functionality within such areas as mobile Internet," Amadeus said.
The companies signed a long-term agreement with Bennett BTI and TRX to handle ticketing and customer support. TRX also is behind a new corporate travel agency site offered by Qantas. The Australian carrier will use TRX's Res-Assist booking product and its PowerCoRRe mid-office automation tool for its Qantas Business Travel site.
Qantas will pilot the system in Sydney later this year, and plans to fully implement it for Australian-based corporate customers in 2001.