ITA To Do Booking W/ Worldspan

<B>ITA To Do Booking W/ Worldspan</B>

By Jay Campbell

<I>Orlando - </I>ITA Software, developer of the highly touted fare shopping engine set to power the airline-owned Orbitz booking site, last month announced that it will offer its own booking tool with seat availability and car and hotel information provided by Worldspan.

Meanwhile, corporate travel managers "are not waiting" until Orbitz's planned June 2001 launch to contact Orbitz, but CEO Jeff Katz said he has "no good answer" as to whether the site will be set up for managed travel.

Some observers think the corporate market is a natural for Orbitz, though a managed travel site would require "a very high service component," Katz said, with tools to enable such requirements as corporate travel policies.

Speaking with BTN at the Etravelworld conference here on Sept. 21, Katz noted that the acquisition of GetThere Inc. by Sabre (BTN, Sept. 4) leaves "a big gap. I'm quite certain there will be other players. Internationally, you'll see alliances and Orbitz could play a role."

Katz must have known ITA and Worldspan would make their announcement the same day.

"We've met with many travel managers and I've formed a view of what's critical," said ITA chief executive officer Jeremy Wertheimer, an engineer. "Looking at it from a distance, the lack of penetration by existing corporate tools tells me something's wrong. I don't know if it's that the customers are no good, the suppliers are no good or both. For us, it has become clear that if you want to sell a shopping engine, you need to sell a booking engine too."

Cambridge, Mass.-based ITA hopes to offer the booking product to "Web sites, online travel agencies and corporations" in early 2001, "unless a client is really in a rush," said Wertheimer.

Work on the booking engine with Worldspan is complete, and ITA expects by year-end to test its XML-based negotiated faring through a partnership with the Highwire booking product that is being tested by Amazon.com (BTN, Aug. 14).

Wertheimer said he has "some early sketches" on the system's pricing model, and that other components would be added to the product as clients demand them. He highlighted ITA's capability to provide historical fare information for benchmarking and airline contracting strategies.

ITA is just beginning conversations with corporate travel prospects, which is why it decided to shun its usual policy against announcing something that's unavailable and instead released the news, preempting industry gossip. Wertheimer said he was not responding to the Sabre-GetThere combination.

Wertheimer plans to do a lot of hiring over the next six months in a "pretty fast expansion mode." Yet, he is unsure of whether ITA would sell its booking system directly or through partnerships.

Born in the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, ITA now has about two dozen employees and is growing quickly to tackle a multitude of travel projects. Its fare shopping capability, demonstrated in beta at www.itasoftware.com, prompted Amadeus to take a 20 percent stake in the company two years ago (BTN, Sept. 7, 1998).

The shopping engine connects with the Airline Tariff Publishing Corp. clearinghouse to which airlines file and from which global distribution systems download raw fare data. It is lauded for its ability to simultaneously search billions of fare possibilities and come up with connecting combinations and alternative airports that people might not otherwise consider.

"They have developed a software to do what people with a sense of geography have been doing for years," said Onetravel.com fare expert Terry Trippler. "I've been impressed when I ran models on the beta site, and I'm encouraged by the fact that they're tied in to ATPCO, because they get fares directly from the airlines."

Wertheimer said ITA has done "pretty careful comparisons under business travel conditions. For example, one of the largest corporate travel agencies gave us a typical corporate itinerary where policy allowed a stop if it saved over X dollars."

According to ATPCO president Mike Ferrier, ITA offers "a unique perspective at fare searching. Their technological capabilities are extraordinary in being able to do such complex processes with great response time."

ATPCO, which makes data available to anyone, has just 16 customers for the North American fare data, including six airlines, the four GDSs, Harrell Associates, ITA and Automated Travel Systems, which now is owned by GetThere (BTN, June 26).

"In order to build a large-scale booking system with corporate negotiated fares, you must have your own pricing component," said Automated Travel Systems founder Seth Perelman. "Without it, the airlines' internal systems don't do price shopping. For GetThere, acquiring ATS was not only logical but a necessary addition to their booking system."

ATPCO's Ferrier said the benefit of connecting with ATPCO as opposed to the GDSs is that "you can apply your own pricing logic and develop your own capabilities in working with data. You work with it as data as opposed to message responses to queries."

ATPCO recently created a new rules category for negotiated fares that provides the airlines with a single point of distribution to the GDSs. Traditionally, travel agencies load negotiated fares into the GDSs from disparate locations. GDSs do not guarantee these negotiated fares as they do public fares, but negotiated fares loaded through ATPCO will be guaranteed.

"This gives a vehicle for control and consistency in the marketplace," said Ferrier, "and allows airlines and agencies to automate the process.