<B>TechTalk</B>
By Cheryl Rosen
<B>Via Takes The Inside Path</B>
In a New Year that no doubt will bring a host of non-traditional aggregators into the travel purchasing space, Via World Network, which invented the concept, has given it up entirely and moved in a new direction.
Rather than offering travel booking to corporations, Via now is marketing its technology to online travel distributors and travel management companies. At long last, said sales and marketing vice president Matt Duffy, the company hopes to find a market for its travel booking technology inside products sold by others.
"We were on two roads but shut one down," Duffy said. "We decided not to create a full-service offering, and instead to adopt an 'Intel Inside' approach."
Via debuted in 1996 as an Andersen Consulting spinoff, in perhaps the first broad and clear vision of what we today would call a business-to-business e-commerce site. Like the new offerings this month from EDS and PricewaterhouseCoopers (see story, page 1), it was designed to link Andersen's own travel purchasing with that of its customers and share in the savings in distribution costs. But the vision was so far ahead of its time that its e-commerce innovations-direct connections with suppliers, full-sentence speech recognition for placing orders, its own pricing engine that automated refunds and exchanges, and a pay-at-use system that did not bill travelers until they actually boarded the plane--remain at the far side of the cutting edge even today.
Still used by Andersen internally, Via has direct connections to six airlines (United, American, Northwest, TWA, Continental and USAirways), and books 12,000 to 15,000 transactions a month, about 40 percent of all Andersen tickets. It is shooting to move 70 percent of Andersen's volume online by year-end.
<A NAME="2"><B>GetThere Triples Online Booking Volume</B>
In its first earnings report since going public, GetThere.com announced third-quarter revenues of $4.4 million, up 139 percent from $1.8 million in the third quarter of last year. Transactions for the online travel booking system rose to 433,000, almost triple the volume of Q3 last year. CFO Ken Pelowski said the positive results showed corporate customer growth, higher adoption rates and increased usage of the supplier sites that GetThere hosts, including those of new customers Northwest and America West airlines. Like most companies in the Internet space, however, the online booking company has yet to make money; GetThere had a total net loss for the quarter of $14.1 million, or $0.59 per share.
<A NAME="3"><B>Trip Manager Goes Dutch</B>
Worldspan's Trip Manager online booking system is headed for Holland, where a private-label version will be offered to small and mid-size companies by Traxxer, the corporate services division of KLM Royal Dutch Airlines.
"The online consumer market is growing very fast in Holland, but business-to-business commerce still has a long way to go," acknowledged Traxxer e-commerce marketing manager Paul Longarini. "This is a trial for us, to see how automated travel booking will work out. It's quite a learning curve."
Traxxer will offer "a wide portfolio" of travel management products, including credit cards, air travel cards and Captura's expense-reporting software, along with a private label of Trip Manager, to be dubbed E-Traxxer.
Worldspan staff vice president for e-commerce, corporate and consumer markets Vela McClam-Mitchell said the GDS had been testing Trip Manager in Holland and Ireland before signing Traxxer on as its distributor, and is "looking at other markets in Europe as well."
<A NAME="4"><B>Cornerstone Expands Travel Tech Offerings</B>
Cornerstone Information Systems, a travel technology consultant and software developer, has acquired New Media Solutions, which supplies consolidated real-time pre- and post-ticketing information to corporate intranets within 10 minutes of a reservation being made. Cornerstone also rolled out TripCast.Com, an end-to-end automated travel booking system for lightly managed business travelers that includes expense reporting, travel policy compliance and back-end fulfillment and ticket delivery.
<A NAME="5"><B>OAG Moves To Notes</B>
OAG has released its Travel Information System on the Lotus Notes platform, so travelers now can easily prepare itineraries, e-mail then to the travel department and integrate them with their Lotus Notes calendars. The OAG system provides information on 600,000 flights and 70,000 hotels, though not yet booking capabilities.