New Booking Products Focus On Agencies

If travelers can book their own tickets in a click-and-drag environment, surely full-time travel agents can be quickly trained to do the same thing.

Even as travel technology developers race to bring booking options to the corporate desktop, insiders acknowledge that self-service reservations are not the answer for every traveler at every company. What the industry really needs this year, many argue, are systems aimed not at travelers, but at the traditional distributor of travel services--the travel agent.

Three products hitting the travel agency market--Sabre's Planet Sabre, Aqua Software's Agent Powerstation and Apollo's Millennium 3--seek to answer the same question: If travel systems can be taught to speak English, why are we still forcing travel agents to learn archaic codes?

In a tight labor market, easy-to-use systems will allow agencies to hire staff from a broader pool of agents, based on their customer service skills rather than their CRS proficiency. Agents will be able to focus on the customer rather than on typing code. And having access to the information resources of the Web will allow them to offer customized destination information to develop one-on-one marketing for their best customers.

Planet Sabre and Agent Powerstation debuted on the same day last month, highlighting what will surely be a tough competition for the hearts of American agents. In Sabre's favor is its already wide distribution as the leading American CRS, a low one-time price of only $100 per workstation that includes a Netscape browser and a modem, and a wide index of Internet information. Its current version, written in C++, includes hotel and car booking capabilities and 17 additional applications, but no air bookings. Sabre argues that trained agents already can quickly make air reservations using the traditional codes. An air booking module that integrates Sabre's Bargain Finder Plus low-fare search capability will be added in the next release, due this summer.

Santa Ana, Calif.-based Aqua Software Products Inc. is counting on the trump card of CRS independence, as it will offer access to all CRS systems, allowing agents to switch from one to another using the identical interface. And as the developer of the industry-standard quality control system for travel agencies, Aqua, too, has a wide customer base.

Apollo's Millennium 3 (BTN, June 10, 1996) will be a step behind by the time it gets out of the starting gate at its subscriber conference in July, but the CRS says its careful development cycle will result in a well thought-out and well-supported system.

At a glitzy release of its new product in New York, Sabre Travel Information Network president Jeff Katz underlined Sabre's commitment to the travel agency distribution system. "Agencies will continue to be the predominant way people shop for and purchase travel," he said. "But we do believe that as suppliers push for better efficiency in distribution, the truly remarkable practicality of today's technology will change the way we all do business. We believe that agencies will aggressively use technology to drive down their costs of doing business and to better integrate their services with the computer systems of their clients."

Sabre vice president of product marketing Nancy Raynor said Sabre sees the Internet as an "information library" as well as a distribution mechanism.

"It's about building a community and giving agents the ability to market themselves in a new way," she said. "So we're taking the best of Sabre content and combining it with the added content available over the Internet, and providing that to our agency customers."

The strategy seems to be off to a good start: An early release of Planet Sabre to selected customers in October resulted in 4,000 licenses, with about half of those already installed, Raynor said. Sabre expects to sell 15,000 systems in 1997, and sales are "on track to beat that based on where we are today," she said. In addition, an earlier Sabre product, TurboSabre, has 10,000 customers and will continue to be offered to high-volume corporate res centers and agencies that need to integrate other databases with a reservation capability at the point of sale. Every Sabre agency is expected to have one or the other within three years, Raynor said.

Sabre managing director of global agency solutions Tom Klein said the CRS "is looking at the Web and its related technologies as a tremendous opportunity that provides us and our partners with a competitive advantage, and we are integrating it into everything we do."

By the end of this month, all Sabre agencies will be offered private-labeled Websites of their own at no cost, he said. In addition, the CRS offers Business Travel Solutions for the corporate travel buyer, Travelocity for consumers (www.travelocity.com) and Web Marketing services for agents.

Aqua's Powerstation also is based on a C++ engine--but one built to interface with all the CRSs, as well as with data from other external sources and databases--and a communications program that allows agents to send and receive e-mail, and to send faxes. Aqua also is beta testing two "telephony" voice recognition systems (see story, Page 16) and plans "a major commitment to telephony, so that when a customer calls in, the agent will have access to traveler and corporate profiles and the itinerary of the trip in progress," said Walter Williams, Aqua's former chief technology officer, who last month was promoted to president.

For now, Powerstation includes the capability to send a message to travelers' beepers saying the agent got them an upgrade or wait-list clearance, or that there is a better fare available than the one they booked. It also enables them to send an e-mail message or page to a travel manager warning them if their system is down or cataloguing what was booked online the previous day. Like Planet Sabre, it also brings a catalog of the best Internet travel services to every agent's desktop.

Bruce Rognlien, chief executive of Aqua Software and of Associated Travel in Los Angeles, said that the system has been in development for two years, since Aqua first identified the need to move quality control to the point of sale. With airline commission caps leading not only to fee-based contracts but also to a tightening of the labor market for agents, "customers are demanding better service, but at the same time agencies need to focus on operational efficiencies," he said. "The industry needed a product to address both requirements."

"The main difference between our product and those of the CRSs is our independence," Rognlien said. "Millenium is and will always be an Apollo system, just as Planet Sabre will be a Sabre system. Our approach is that the data in the CRSs is great, but the access systems need improvement."

Craig Hannenberg, MIS director for Chicago-based Arrington Travel Center, agreed, saying that an automated system allowing multi-CRS access is a real advantage in the corporate market, where different corporations often dictate the use of different CRSs.

"Some of our customers have been using one CRS forever, and while they may change agencies and come to Arrington, they don't want to change their CRS at the same time," he said. "Any product built by a CRS will be 100 percent in tune with that CRS only, where that's not true with an independent system. Also, agencies that use more than one CRS never use all of them evenly, so there is less staff supporting the smaller one. A system like Agent Powerstation will make that issue go away, since all agents will be able to make bookings on all CRS systems."

Aqua's traditional customer base includes "four or five" corporate customers who book travel in-house, Rognlien said, and he does see the large corporate market as a customer base for agent-focused software. "There are corporations that are totally on their own appointments, and those that manage their own, who have a budget to buy software like this," Rognlien said. "And every corporation on BTN's Top 100 list (BTN, July 15, 1996) is either buying technology or looking at it. That's a market we're trying to build. We don't want to get in the way of the corporate-agency relationship. We've said to customers that we don't have to be their agency; we want to be their independent system integrator."

Agent Powerstation has been in development for 20 months at a cost of over $1 million, Rognlien said. Beta tests of the system with Sabre and Apollo interfaces were conducted at Associated Travel and at Mutual Travel in Seattle. A Worldspan link will begin testing at Travel Inc. in Atlanta this spring.

At Apollo, marketing and sales director Lynne Rosenbaum cited the CRS' "multimillion-dollar development effort" in bringing Millennium 3 to market, and pledged that Apollo's "people and resources will provide unsurpassed support" to its agency customers.

While acknowledging that Millennium 3 will work only with the Apollo CRS, at least at first, "that's not to say it couldn't work with the others with only minimal changes," Rosenbaum said. And, she maintained, the great majority of Apollo agencies use only one CRS.

Millennium 3 this spring will begin alpha testing of its "design and functionality" with a mix of large and small, corporate and leisure agencies, "to ensure that it gives agencies a working tool to use in a controlled environment," she said. The beta testing that follows will test the entire product package, including the support. Unlike Planet Sabre, all Millenium 3 tests will include air as well as hotel and car bookings, because "air transactions take up most of an agent's time--not just in the booking, but in exchanging, working the queues and dealing with customer complaints and changes," Rosenbaum said. "It's an oversimplification to say that everybody knows how to make an air booking. If that were true, my help desk would not be taking as many air calls as it does."

It is in part because of its belief that Millennium 3 will save money for the computer reservation system as well as for its agency customers that Apollo's intention is to offer the product "at nominal cost," though it has not yet been able to set an exact price.

Unlike the other two products, Millennium 3 is a Windows-based system, not an Internet one. But Apollo last month debuted a Website (www.apollo.com) that will offer agents the kind of proprietary travel information envisioned by the Planet Sabre team. About 40 percent of Apollo agencies have Web access, "but all prefer not to have it at each agent's workstation," Rosenbaum said.

Apollo customer Sarah Henshall of AAA Travel Agency in Charlotte, N.C., said she is looking forward to the new click-and-drag environment to improve productivity of both new and existing staffers, and noted that AAA is introducing a product of its own, Avatar, which will allow the auto club to cross-train its agents to add hotel and car reservations to its current list of services for travelers. Since Avatar is a wide area network-based system, she plans to offer it to those agencies that have a WAN, and to go with Milennium at those who do not, she said.