Total Travel Mgmt. To Give Away Booking Software

<H1> Total Travel Mgmt. To Give Away Booking Software</H1>By Cheryl Rosen

<I>Troy, Mich. </I>- He may be a long-term gadfly in the face of travel technology, but nobody at the NBTA show was offering a better price on automated booking systems than Total Travel Management chairman Brent Garback, whose CoPilot II carries a price tag of zero.

"I don't think people want to pay anything for an Internet product, and I don't think they have to," Garback said. "Booking systems are designed to attack the 60 percent of the travel agency's cost that consists of labor, and substantively are a way for agencies to increase their profits-and customers shouldn't have to pay for that. There ought to be enough money left over in the savings on the bookings to cover the costs."

Garback warned that "there are a lot of wolves out there trying to increase their profitability by locking in corporate accounts through installed solutions that make it difficult to change agencies, corporate cards, CRSs, airlines. It's a Trojan Horse-you'll pay for the booking and the management reporting and the T&E piece, and then change will be so disruptive to your organization that the incumbent will be locked in." Still, Garback could not explain how free systems will change that equation.

In September, he will begin rolling out the Internet-based CoPilot II to his corporate customers-at no cost. General Motors, the super-regional agency's biggest customer with $300 million in air volume, is scheduled to come on board first.

On the trade show floor, three industry insiders in a row called Garback "an extremely intelligent guy" who had the foresight in 1989 to patent the concept of automated booking systems that filter requests through corporate travel policy. Since then, they say, Garback has contacted developers of many new systems about infringing on his patent, but has never actually followed through with formal legal action. Garback is now ready to file suit against Microsoft over its corporate booking system, according to one TTM employee.

Said one industry insider, "Brent has written us letters in the past about our own technology, but he has never followed up. I think patenting as broad a concept as automated booking systems is like patenting the commode, and his patent is on LAN-based systems anyway, not Internet ones. But Brent is a very litigious guy, and Microsoft's deep pockets are a perfect target for him.