<B> Tech Talk</B>
By Mary Ann McNulty, Technology Editor
<B>GTE, ATS Team On Speech Recognition</B>
GTE Internetworking of Cambridge, Mass., and Automated Travel Systems of New York City are combining their products to offer travel agencies and corporations a voice response based travel reservation and booking tool called TravelXpress. Using GTEI's speech recognition technology and ATS' ResFax software, travelers can request airline schedules and fare details from any phone and receive a fax of their options a few minutes later.
Included are the lowest fare or corporate negotiated fare. The traveler also can use the speech recognition technology to call back to book flights by referencing line numbers on the fax.
Omega World Travel in Fairfax, Va., is the first travel agency to sign up for the new service. "This solution offsets the cost to travel agencies of handling information calls by live agents," said Dan Bohan, chief operating officer at Omega. "We estimate that we can save anywhere from 40 to 60 percent in staffing and related costs by using a system with speech- recognition capability."
TravelXpress can be deployed without purchasing hardware or software, as it is only available as a service bureau on a transaction-fee basis. Travel agencies or corporations also can private label the product by paying a nominal, one-time set-up fee.
<a name="2"><B>Investors Bet $15 Million On Xtra OnLine</B>
In its third and last round of financing before going public, Dallas-based Xtra On-Line Corp. received more than $15 million in "over-subscribed" private equity financing. Venture capital groups that previously invested $7.5 million into XOL also reinvested in the company in this third round of financing, according to CEO Bill Diffenderffer. Investors in the two previous rounds of financing included Austin Ventures, BankAmerica Ventures and Applied Technology.
A chunk of the latest investment came from high net worth investors who participate in a fund of BT Alex Brown, the investment banking firm. "We were engaged in an over-subscribed offering of Xtra On-Line; the interest exceeded expectations," said Tom Hitchner, managing director for the firm. "The online travel market and its untapped opportunities held enthusiastic appeal for investors."
Xtra plans to use the cash to develop its resources, particularly its sales and marketing, software developers and support. The money also will be used for operating capital over the next 12 to 24 months, before the company expects to issue an initial public offering. "We plan to hire two sales people a month for the next 24 months," Diffenderffer said.
<a name="3"><B>IBM Promotes E-Commerce In Travel</B>
Trying to leverage electronic commerce opportunities in the travel industry, IBM has integrated its transaction processing facility (TPF) with the Apache HTTP Web server. The development means faster Web-based travel reservations, credit card verifications and other critical transactions.
There had been no native Web server for TPF before, but now companies will be able to server their pages directly to their Internet customers. The Apache Project is a collaborative software development effort that creates a robust, commercial-grade and freely available source code implementation of the HTTP server. It is jointly managed by a group of global volunteers who use the Web to communicate, plan and develop the Apache server. More than half of Web sites on the Internet are using Apache and its derivatives today.
Both Visa International and Worldspan see great potential in this development. David Harms, director of technical and consulting services at Worldspan, said the TPF/Apache Web server will provide a single source of travel information and data for end users versus having to use multiple platforms, as is now the case.
<a name="4"><B>Italian Group Deploys TTG Software</B>
The Millenium Team, a consortium of three major Italian travel agencies, has purchased licenses for Travel Technologies Group's CoRRe quality control and management software, and its ResAssist Web-based booking tool. The software will be used in the consortium's offices in Florence, Milan, Rome, Treviso and Venice by the end of the month.
The three agencies in the consortium are Ventura, Da Verrazzano and Bonomi e Pagani, which service such corporate accounts as Andersen Consulting, the Benetton Group, Coca-Cola and Gucci. More than 70 percent of the consortium's $125 million in 1998 bookings is from corporate travel.