Reporter's Notebook: Amadeus, Amex Show Int'l Buyers New MIS Software
<I>Malmo, Sweden</I> - Both Amadeus and American Express previewed new management information software products for corporate clients at last month's International Business Travel Association Congress in Sweden.
Amadeus has come up with an information analysis tool called Zoom that allows travel users to discover easily who has flown where and with which airline. Amex's Air Power is similar. Billed as an MIS reporting tool that supports negotiations with airlines and other statistical analysis, it is to be followed by additional systems called Payment Power and Corporate Payment Power, which will allow travel managers to review their spend.
Zoom initially will be released to European travel agents next month in disk form. Amadeus said a version for travel managers will follow at the end of the year, possibly on an Internet platform. It will also be made available to System One customers in the United States.
Amadeus product manager Dominic Carvalho said Zoom is flexible enough to withstand most forms of data interrogation. Examples of applications include learning how many sectors have been flown with each airline over a specified period and on specified city pairs, alerting all travelers flying to a particular airport about last-minute strikes, and spotting which travelers are regularly flying with non-policy carriers.
''We could have supplied this information to customers in the past, but it would have had to be done on a batch process overnight. Zoom allows far faster and deeper interrogation,'' Carvalho said. ''Customers have been saying to us that they are looking for a product where they can tune the data themselves.''
Amadeus is committed strategically to working with travel agents, and therefore Zoom will be distributed to corporate clients only through agents. Whether the company pays a charge will be at the agent's discretion.
Zoom is not able to track unused tickets or flown data, but, Carvalho said, ''our next projects are to integrate local service providers, invoicing and back-office information, then some preferred travel and expense system partners and eventually credit cards. If we can get flown data, we can do it. Today, we don't get flown data. This is not a technical problem; it is a business problem.''
Similarly, said Carvalho, it is technically possible to load in data from other computer reservations systems, but no agreement has been reached to do so.
Meanwhile, American Express is developing its Air Power software for multinational card clients based in Europe. The product tracks global air data spent through the Amex card and is downloaded to client servers.
A scaled-down intranet version will be made available with Rome, the end-to-end system being devised in conjunction with Microsoft. This is scheduled to be beta tested in Europe in the last quarter of 1997 and launched in first quarter 1998. Amex said the intranet version of Air Power will be less comprehensive because narrow bandwidths make it less efficient than a client-server platform.
Air Power, a management information system based on business travel account data, was developed by U.K. software house Softwrite of Langley, Berkshire. Softwrite also is involved in three other Amex products in development. Payment Power is currently being tested at Amex's Ford in-plant in the United Kingdom, and further tests will follow shortly in Germany and France.
Corporate Payment Power, which is in the planning stage, will offer data on all Amex card transactions. The plan is for all the Air Power functions to be bundled into a package specifically for intranet users, to be called Power Portfolio (BTN, May 19).
Demonstrating the Air Power product at Malmo, Amex business analyst Eric Headley said first-time users will be given six months of historic data. ''That will allow them to get right in there and do some trending from the start,'' said Headley.
Clients can customize the system to reflect the hierarchy of their company and analyze expenses by division, department or business project. The reporting platform, called Cognos, has been developed by another U.K. firm called Impromptu. Among the criteria by which information can be interrogated are ticket number, fare type and passenger.
Users can construct the information as pie charts and then break down each section of the pie as they drill down for more specific data.
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IBTA communications chief Joan Scales took advantage of the conference to unveil the association's Website, IBTA.com.
Pages include data on IBTA history, management, allied council members and national associations. The site also carries information on IBTA's newly formulated strategic plan. IBTA's national leaders still are hashing out details, but objectives include building the group's membership, increasing the number of national associations (Italy is expected to be the next country to form one), advancing the professional development of members through educational programs and strengthening IBTA's financial position.
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"Crisis--what crisis?" was the question asked by Amadeus marketing senior vice president David Jones at a seminar on the changing distribution channel. Despite doubts about their future, the battle between airlines and travel agents to distribute airline tickets to corporate buyers has been ''won hands down by travel agents,'' Jones said. In 1980, 53 percent of air sales in the United States were handled by agents; in 1996, the figure was 80 percent.
''In the future,'' Jones said, ''the winner will be whoever offers the best means of electronic distribution.'' For European travel managers, one popular form of distribution could well prove to be cross-border ticketing, where a company issues tickets for all its European employees at just one office and sends them across the continent via satellite ticket printer.
''Electronic ticketing is what is needed for cross-border ticketing to realize its full potential,'' Jones said. E-ticketing is just starting to catch on in Europe, led by airlines such as Lufthansa and British Airways.
Ian Wheeler, European marketing director for OAG, said at the seminar that travelers had not yet become accustomed to direct online booking.
In a recent survey of 5,500 frequent business travelers, 25 percent had accessed the Internet for travel purposes, but only 4 percent of those who had accessed it made a booking.
The major means of distribution remains the telephone. ''Are corporates pushing for a change in distribution? In our experience, no,'' Wheeler said. Instead, they want control over costs, policy compliance, efficiency and productivity, he said.
Before changing to direct online reservations, a corporation needs to consider issues such as type of platform, internal communications and training, and handling multi-site locations and suppliers.
''But the biggest issue,'' Wheeler said, ''is having clear objectives to ensure the corporate's costs of managing travel do not increase as a result of implementing unproven new systems and taking on the role of booking.''
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The next IBTA Congress will be held in Montreal from May 21 through 24, 1998. The following congress will be staged in Helsinki during the first week of June 1999.