<B> @Rosenbluth On A Rollout</B>
By Sarah Welt
Rosenbluth International has completed seven client installations of its @Rosenbluth online booking system and plans to have at least 10 more clients up and running by year-end.
Rosenbluth began beta testing @Rosenbluth with two clients in late February and has been adding one or two a month since April, said director of marketing strategy and development Justin Shaw. While most clients have followed the industry pattern of booking less than 5 percent of their tickets online, one client is nearing 7 percent usage, Shaw said.
The Philadelphia-based mega agency plans to wean users off its older E-Res system to the newer @Rosenbluth, a private label of Xtra On-line Corp.'s PowerTrip, over the next couple of months.
A new release of @Rosenbluth, scheduled for late August, will add a structured data interface that the agency expects will increase the speed of data access fivefold and will incorporate Rosenbluth's Res-Monitor, which continues to search for the lowest fare option after a trip has been booked. Also new will be an enhanced version of Dacoda that will color-code trip options according to corporate travel policy. Preferred carriers will be highlighted in green, options that fall within corporate policy but are not on preferred carriers will show up in yellow, and flights that are outside of travel policy altogether will be red.
While Rosenbluth originally had expected to have integrated at least one expense reporting system with @Rosenbluth by June (<I>BTN,</I> Dec. 7, 1998), theprocess has taken longer than anticipated, and no decision is expected for another couple of months. But Shaw noted that Quicken's ExpensAble system is integrated with XOL, and since Rosenbluth has marketing alliances with Extensity Inc. and Captura Software, "we are talking about doing a fairly tight integration with one of their products. If the bulk of our clients have already selected one versus the other, that would obviously influence our decision."
In private labeling PowerTrip, Shaw said, Rosenbluth added its own graphical user interface on the front end and a "Quick Trip" template that allows travelers to call up a past trip in order to book a new one more quickly. That innovation has since been added to the core XOL product, Shaw said.
Next on the development agenda are improved hotel and low-fare option displays for the Rosenbluth version, said XOL CEO Bill Diffenderffer. Where the core system displays only the lowest fare, Rosenbluth wanted "other options that may not be the lowest," Diffenderffer said.
Other @Rosenluth modules also are in development. The Vision@Rosenbluth management reporting system has moved to beta testing with two clients, with five more scheduled for July, and general release by the fourth quarter.
eVision@Rosenbluth is scheduled to go into beta in July as well. "We expect that one to be much faster and will be looking for general availability early in the fourth quarter," Shaw said.
In turn, iVision@Rosenbluth should begin beta testing in the first quarter of next year.