Travelport is set to announce a partnership with a self-booking tool provider that covers the European, Asian and Australian markets, deputy group CEO Gordon Wilson told
BTN yesterday. The technology firm also is poised to sign a partnership deal with a different booking tool provider in the United States, in spite of the fact that Travelport has started ramping up promotion of its self-created tool, Traversa, which it debuted with customer IBM last year.
Wilson said 250,000 IBM travelers currently use Traversa in 16 countries, and the world's largest spender on corporate travel will roll the tool out to 70 countries by the end of 2010. In addition, he said, Travelport has started to deploy Traversa in two additional but undisclosed high-spending multinational companies.
"Traversa is for large corporations," said Wilson. "For others, it may be a sledgehammer to crack a nut. We think it is better to brand a family of solutions than develop three solutions ourselves." Travelport already has a long-standing partnership in place with KDS, which is especially popular in Europe.
Travelport has also been working on a variety of channels to sell unbundled airline products through its Galileo and Worldspan global distribution systems. Partly to solve this problem, it is launching its long-heralded Universal Desktop agents' system this summer. Flight Centre, owner of the multinational travel management company FCm, will be the launch customer, but it will also become the underlying technology for corporate booking tools powered by Travelport.
Universal Desktop is driven by what Travelport calls a universal API—application programming interface—which will allow it to take feeds directly from suppliers' systems. Wilson claimed this would benefit corporate clients in ways beyond distributing unbundled airfares.
"The universal API will enable us to serve up a much wider array of content," he said. "Air is a smaller proportion of corporate travel spend than other items combined. We will be able to bring these other areas of spend into corporate travel programs much more easily and make it possible to capture the data for them."
Wilson also told
BTN that Travelport intends to resurrect the stock market flotation
it abandoned in February in sharp contrast to Amadeus, which is set to start trading on the Spanish stock exchange at €11 per share tomorrow. Wilson blamed Travelport's abandonment on poor timing by attempting to float when market confidence was still fragile.
Asked if the next attempt will take weeks, months or years, he said: "Having been bitten by our advisers getting the market wrong, we want to make sure the window is fully open next time, but I would be disappointed if it was years."