Oracle Links To Car, Rail
<B> Oracle Links To Car, Rail</B>
<I>E-Travel Ties Hertz Direct Bookings Back To The PNR</I>
By Cheryl Rosen
A full year after beginning work on linking their systems without a GDS intermediary, Oracle E-Travel and Hertz Rent A Car have found a solution to the final pressing problem of direct connections: the link back to the passenger name record.
While they were at it, E-Travel announced a direct link to Amtrak that also will bypass global distribution systems.
With the new system in place, data on Hertz or Amtrak bookings made in the Oracle E-Travel corporate booking system will be collected from the reservation, forwarded to an Oracle database and then fed back to the PNR available to the corporate travel agency.
The link to the PNR is a key element in car rental booking, since travelers expect changes they make to their airline reservation to be passed along automatically to the car rental counter.
Said one insider, "Car rental is the only industry segment that's dependent on another industry segment to provide service. Today, if your plane reservation changes, the GDS tells Hertz that you're going to arrive late, while if you make a reservation directly with Hertz, they won't know that. That's why having an integrated PNR is so important. Oracle E-Travel says they have resolved the issue, so that the system will automatically update Hertz about airline changes. And I'm sure they have."
Hertz executive vice president of marketing and sales Brian Kennedy said the ETLink offers value to both Hertz and the corporate customers who pushed for it.
"Corporate customers are looking for ways to reduce car rental costs, but there are a very limited number of ways to do that--and this is one," Kennedy told BTN. "A lot of corporate customers want to do this to cut transaction costs, and it's easy enough to do because car rental doesn't require tickets of any kind. We have the ability to link, strip the information and send it back to the PNR. And it affects our costs as well as our accounts'--it's cheaper than the GDS. It was in everybody's best interest to solve this, and I think it will become a significant factor."
"We absolutely have solved the PNR issue, because our corporate customers insisted that we do," said E-Travel's Rick Lifsitz. "It doesn't make sense to have to manually tie things together. With our system, the reservation goes into the Hertz system and brings back a confirmation number and details of the car. That information is stored in the Oracle database and then goes from there into the PNR as a manual segment, so the agency is aware that it is there. Hertz gets the flight information with the record, so they can track the flight in the PNR and have a car ready in the event of schedule changes."
In a similar arrangement on the Amtrak side, the data goes directly through the ETLink system into Amtrak's inventory, through the Oracle database and back to the agency, allowing "travelers who are disconnected from their travel plans to call the agency and have all the information."
While acknowledging that the system is not an exclusive arrangement on either side, Kennedy indicated that the nation's largest car rental company is at least leaning toward a preferred relationship with the newest player in the corporate online booking market. "We will provide customers any option they want, because it's not good to offer customers only one solution," he said. "But there are some links we prefer because of partnerships, and Oracle is a long-term partner of Hertz."
Kennedy also said Hertz is "seeing substantial volume over the Internet, now more than $3 million, probably more than half of that from corporate travelers."
To an E-Travel user, the back-end connection to Hertz remains virtually invisible. When an airline ticket is booked and a car is needed, the system prepopulates the dates from the itinerary, then asks travelers to choose a car type. If the choice is outside of corporate policy, they can enter a reason like "traveling with customer." If they choose a vendor other than Hertz, the system will go to the GDS for inventory.
The system also shows full folio data on the car, rather than just the basic rate, so travelers will find no big surprises at the counter. On a $48 basic rate, the system listed a vehicle license fee of $1.55, a city surcharge of $10.30 and local tax of $5.00, for a total charge of $62.85.
Oracle E-Travel's Steve Willis said, "now that the link is open, we'll be able to add more things--pictures of the cars, promotions, upgrade offers. Oracle has negotiated that we as employees get upgrades and lower rates for bypassing the GDS. And the data is not public anywhere--noone has access to our negotiated rates. It's completely private between the vendor and the client.