Online Booking Gear Poised To Deploy In Europe

<B> Online Booking Gear Poised To Deploy In Europe</B>

By Mary Ann McNulty

The European online booking landscape looks a lot like the picture in the United States in early 1997, with much curiosity, return on investment case studies and plenty of pilots. In the words of Yogi Berra, "It's deja vu all over again."

Vendors are optimistic that those pilots will blossom into full-blown deployments this year, making 1999 the big year for Europe. For now, there are just a handful of actual implementations, with most too new to provide auditable figures.

Earlier this month, Texas Instruments deployed Internet Travel Network to its employees in the United Kingdom. The move came almost a year after ITN and Texas Instruments announced the plan, due to a variety of "technicalities with the product," said Maria Puig, TI's corporate travel manager. "Now, we're finally on track," with plans to move into France, Germany, Holland and then Asia.

In the meanwhile, "We're doing great with the usage and adoption rate in the United States," she said, with 20 to 25 percent of all bookings going through the ITN system, which is called TravelChoice within TI. By year-end, TI expects to move 40 percent of its domestic bookings through TravelChoice.

One of the technicalities, according to ITN co-founder and vice president of new business development Dan Whaley, involved devising a way to build passenger name records in the same way each agency constructs them in the global distribution system. "One of the challenges we faced and met in 1998 was to have employees sitting in London, Helsinki, Munich, Hong Kong and Paris all have a similar interface and experience as their counterparts in the U.S.," said Tod Lockhard, ITN's director of account management.

ITN also is in the midst of multinational deployments for Credit Suisse, First Boston and a European firm.

As in the United States, the recent commission caps, rising airfares and higher agency fees are putting increasing pressures on European corporations to look for options such as online booking, Lockard said. In Scandinavia in particular, SAS' commission restructuring and the ensuing movement toward transaction pricing has suddenly made online booking an attractive solution to help lower costs.

For other multinationals, the automation is providing the means to communicate and garner usage of global travel policies and preferred vendors. "Corporations are seeing the online solution as an effective global overlay to their travel program, to help communicate their preferred vendors and policy strategies," Lockard said.

Sabre Business Travel Solutions also expected multinationals to be making global decisions on online booking solutions, but has yet to see that happen. Said Peter Stevens, director of marketing and business planning, "They're making those decisions regionally," rather than on a global basis. BTS is seeing quite a bit of interest in Europe, particularly in the United Kingdom and the Asia-Pacific Rim, but has just a handful of pilots, most involving 25 to 50 users in Europe. BTS currently has a French version and is ready to develop other languages as needs are identified.

"I would think that in the summer, we'll start to see some testimonial accounts and good data on trips going through the system," Stevens said.

Heavyweight American Express also has big plans for global deployments, but few widespread case studies to showcase. AXI has been rolled out in Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom, with Mexico in beta. The agency expects to add Germany and Sweden this quarter, said spokesperson Melissa Abernathy.

Worldspan is testing its Trip Manager product in the Netherlands and Ireland, with release slated by the end of March. Some of its 200 existing customers, as well as potential new ones, also have expressed interest in deploying it in Canada and Mexico, a spokesperson said. Trip Manager is a private-label version of Travel Technologies Group's ResAssist.

TTG, the Dallas-based technology development arm of World Travel Partners, said it is relying on distributors, such as the Italian Millennium Group, to deploy ResAssist in Europe. Since just last fall, the group of agencies has enrolled 50 to 100 corporate clients, said Steve Reynolds, newly named president of TTG. Again mirroring the U.S. experience, the challenge now is to get the travelers within those corporations to use the system, he added.

Beyond the language issues, deployment overseas is fraught with other problems, Reynolds cautioned. One of the biggest is that the global distribution systems in Europe don't hold as much inventory as the U.S. ones do.

"In Europe, there's a way to book everything some other way," through consolidators, brokers, etc., Reynolds said. Yet another problem is that some inventory only is available at the country level. Consequently, a traveler or agent in another country can't book inventory, even if it's stored in the same GDS.

Following the release of its next version of ResAssist this summer, Reynolds said, the company plans to focus on a truly global version of the product that will address some of these problems.