Sabre's GetThere subsidiary this week at a customer summit in Las Vegas plans to show clients a new non-GDS content solution to be made available next quarter. Officials said the product improves on GetThere's current Web fare offering and competitive solutions by enhancing travel management control of self-booking.
According to a new BTN poll of key providers, the capabilities of such solutions vary widely. Nearly all are backed by one of three companies—AgentWare, FareChase or TRX—and some could be subject to the outcome of pending litigation between American Airlines and both FareChase and Sabre in a Texas state court. A clerk there last week said final arguments were offered in a hearing to determine whether FareChase should be banned temporarily from "scraping" aa.com without AA's consent. A judge is expected soon to rule on that injunction hearing, and a trial may follow.
GetThere officials distanced their product, WebConnect, from the consequences of such litigation. "We'll be playing it very by the book and if an airline site decides they don't want us scraping them, we won't be scraping them," said Jay GaBany, GetThere director of product marketing. "One reason we chose AgentWare is they are very upfront in their interaction with airline Web sites. For any airline that said no to AgentWare, they will stay away and we will stay away."
"It will be interesting to see whether a state court has jurisdiction on the Web," said Outtask CEO Tom DePasquale, whose product first brought a FareChase connection to corporate booking just over a year ago. "We obviously will adhere to any ruling."
Most of the products described to BTN were made available to clients last year, the vendors said. Nearly all respondents said their systems allow, in ticketing with such sources as Web sites or consolidator databases, the creation of a passive segment in the GDS for reporting and PNR service. In nearly all cases, clients have control over which sources to search. Yet, the similarities just about end there, as a handful of additional key questions produced mixed answers. A free download of the complete results is available
here.Although Web-only fares could diminish in importance—some say they have already—the challenge of accessing content not found in GDSs is neither new nor likely to subside. The issue also is acute in Europe
(see story)."The issue of Web fares has been misinterpreted by the market," said Norm Rose, president of Travel Tech Consulting in Belmont, Calif. "The issue is about the breakdown of the sole-source GDS model. Consider the impact the proposed U.S. Department of Transportation rules could have on the corporate environment. What if suppliers decide to put certain inventory in one GDS but not another? As much as the corporate travel manager continues to try to control this chaotic Web environment, I am afraid the future promises more fragmentation."
The expansion of comprehensive, GDS-based solutions in the near term is far from assured amid wrangling over DOT's proposals
(BTN, Dec. 9, 2002) and a recent DOT proposal to extend to January the current regulatory structure.
Meanwhile, programs to raise the omnipotence of the GDSs' core systems—including Galileo's and Sabre's reduced fees for more content—have disappointed, and even the GDSs are employing aggregators.
"We hope you don't have to go bankrupt to participate," joked Cendant travel distribution division chairman and CEO Samuel Katz late last month at the Masters Program in Washington, D.C., referring to the pair of major airline participants in Galileo's Momentum program
(BTN, Jan. 22). Katz said the uncertainty of the GDS regulations has caused airlines to "wait and see."
During a CIBC World Markets conference last month, Sabre CFO Jeff Jackson said, "There is some hesitation to sign up that has to do with the fact that DOT is looking at the rules."
Although hopeful that Web-only fares would make their way into GDSs within months, Navigant International chairman, president and CEO Ed Adams said, "In this environment, you cannot not offer Web fares."
The issues are redefining a number of roles. "It goes without saying that any non-GDS inventory has to be supported through the channel in which you bought it," said Grant Caplan, principal with Consulting Strategies of Lincolnshire, Ill. "My more creative clients are becoming both agent and arranger, from the standpoint that, 'Since we pay your salary, you should book us on jetblue.com or Swabiz.' "
Inasmuch as corporations wish to centrally manage travel, these developments are providing opportunities to consolidators of booking channels and data. The battle for clients of GetThere, which actively is distributed by all mega agencies except Carlson Wagonlit Travel, is to contain the wandering eyes of travelers lured by Web fares, pop-up advertisements and loyalty bonuses. Competing with sites that employ those tactics and are targeting managed travel, GetThere and its resellers hang their hats on policy-driven travel management
(see story).GetThere for years has employed a "multisource" strategy in its booking tool, where some direct supplier links supplement access to multiple GDSs. "Before, you might have said, 'I want Apollo and Sabre in one site.' Now it's 'Apollo, Sabre and AgentWare,' " said Mark Orttung, vice president of product marketing. "Going to the source and getting the content is one challenge, but for us it's also making sure policy and preferred supplier management are applied correctly. There's a lot of complexity to offering a complete solution."
Access to non-GDS channels, GaBany added, can damage the value of authorized self-booking tools if the systems are clumsy in handling profiles. Some Web sites require travelers to have a unique profile, sometimes using frequent flyer identification. A majority of vendors polled claimed they push profile information automatically to the ticketing site, minimizing the data required of agents and/or travelers.
AgentWare and GetThere are using a proxy approach to cover where the traveler's GDS profile does not pass essential information. In that scenario, the technology acts as the traveler using anonymous or generic data.
"We wanted to avoid exposing the user to another Web site where they could be lured by hyperlinks and banner ads or get confused," GaBany said. "The last thing a corporate travel department will want to do is support a traveler who booked on some Web site."
Other options will include blocking certain sites or excluding certain city pairs in support of preferred vendor agreements, officials said, and bookings ticketed outside the GDS are built into GetThere's agent-accessible Super PNR. Most corporate travel management companies can gather data and issue confirmations without requiring GetThere to build customized formats or scripts to flow such information. GetThere created a passive segment option that does not require suppliers to pay the GDSs.
WebConnect is an adaptation of AgentWare's Travel Console, which GaBany said is "similar to what a lot of other Web robots are, in that they show you the interface from the site and if you choose something, you're on that site and they're looking over your shoulder to gather data. Here, what they end up feeding to us is the data bits we then re-interpolate into our own format."
GetThere clients who elect to use WebConnect pay for access through a slightly higher across-the-board transaction fee, officials said. A one-year commitment is required.