Megas Add New Technology To The Point Of Sale
<B> Megas Add New Technology To The Point Of Sale</B>
By Sarah Welt
The nation's largest agencies are responding to the commission cut crunch by rolling out new systems to speed the booking of reservations at the point of sale.
Rosenbluth International has begun rolling out an automated system that looks at codeshare flights, compares the multiple carriers involved with the preferred suppliers of corporate customers, and makes sure that travelers are booked on the codeshare partner with whom their company has a contract.
The new Automated Preferred Information Display (Rapid) system "has become our point-of-sale technology," replacing a ten-year-old product called Readout, said vice president of supplier relations Michael Boult. By June, Rosenbluth will finish implementing the product around the world on the Galileo/Amadeus platform. The United States will get it first, followed by the United Kingdom and then Australia, Germany and Ireland. The company also is discussing having the system work on Sabre by the fourth quarter.
Since implementing the system, Boult said Rosenbluth has seen compliance among corporate accounts improve "between 5 and 10 percent."
Meanwhile, WorldTravel Partners-BTI Americas is busy integrating BTI Americas' airline contract optimization model (Acom) into CRS Screen Highlighter with ResNotes, to be ready this summer (see story, page 10), so that "companies can look at overrides and point-of-sale net-net marketshare maximization." The system will "tell any agent on any independent GDS screen what the carrier strategy is by city-pair and when it changes," said WTP-BTI Americas co-president Danny Hood.
Both Hood and CEO Jack Alexander said booking travelers on preferred carriers might not always make the most financial sense for a company's bottom line if the codeshare flight is significantly cheaper.
"Highlighter will notify people what to book and then CoRRe will come in and provide a database to really analyze those decisions," said Alexander. "Lots of companies have tried to push more to the point of sale, which is very important. There is an equally important balancing act to ensure that whole quality control functions and fares are caught and analyzed at the mid-office." He also said it is best to keep it simple for agents at the front end and let software do the more exhaustive work.
The broadest initiative will come next month from Carlson Wagonlit Travel, as it begins rolling out what CIO Dick Smith called "the nation's first and only global point-of-sale system" to res centers nationwide. The rollout of Mercury, exact details of which are still under wraps, will begin at "call centers with 200 to 300 seats, but all centers will eventually roll into" ones of that size and get the system, Smith said. Beyond North America, Carlson call centers in Europe will get Mercury next, followed by those in Asia-Pacific countries and then Latin and South America.
Rosenbluth said its new software is necessary to ensure that clients meet volume targets, but not everyone sees the necessity.
Cyndi Perper, travel manager for New York-based Colgate-Palmolive, said her agency, Maritz, "always tries to book our preferred carrier. That would be the first point of entry, and trained agents know if it is a codeshare." If the agent sees no seats on the preferred carrier, only the codeshare, "they can call the sales department of our preferred carrier and explain the situation and sometimes those seats can be freed up."
American Express's director of consulting services Dan Tappen said both codeshare and regular flights appear in its agents' res systems, but seem like one flight to the traveler. Agents book travelers on preferred carriers "without using preferencing software," though he said Amex has that as well.
Earl Foster, global travel manager for Joseph E. Seagram & Sons Inc. in New York, said Rosenbluth's Rapid is a good reminder to agents to book and plate customers on preferred carriers.
But Carlson's Smith said the need runs counter to the current corporate trend of "negotiating with multiple alliance partners so that they see you as a single entity.