<B>Rose Studies E-Booking</B>
Changing market dynamics, e-fulfillment centers, a new definition for direct connections and architectural changes are among the corporate online booking trends discussed in an updated study now available from industry consultant Norm Rose, president of Belmont, Calif.-based Travel Tech Consulting.
Priced at $1,200, with a discount available to members of the Association of Corporate Travel Executives, the study also delves more deeply than any independent report of its kind into the intricacies of different systems from vendors, including E-Travel, Highwire, I:FAO, KDS, TRX, XOL and all four major GDSs. "A clear polarization of the market would seem to be occurring as the traditional industry heavyweights, the GDSs, take control of the new self-booking medium," according to Rose's study, entitled Corporate Self-Booking Tools: An Analytical Study. Datalex, TRX and XOL, he wrote, "seemed poised to compete as technology enablers of the next-generation self-booking tools."
That next generation, Rose figured, takes into account the growing importance of middleware, which shifts "away from the mainframe computing environment" by redefining the GDS information as "one of many potential data sources, rather than the only data source for the transaction."
Rose also touches on adoption strategies, the high cost of integration with such other systems as enterprise resource planning software, Internet-only fares and Orbitz.