<B>Vendors Push Content</B>
<I>Wireless: Second In A Three-Part Series</I>
By Jay Campbell, David Jonas & Bruce Serlen
Despite a lack of platform-based standards, enterprisewide corporate policies and infrastructure, travel and expense vendors are releasing dozens of applications for personal mobile devices. Disappointed with overall adoption, however, most are focusing on content rather than commerce.
Although visionaries see travel as a proverbial "killer app" for mobile channels--perhaps second only to messaging--Alaska Airlines, Extensity, Rosenbluth, Sabre and its GetThere unit, Swissôtel and TRX are just a few of the companies that reported low usage of the mobile services they developed. A source at one corporate travel tech vendor said he was surprised by how low a priority mobile technology is, according to a recent customer survey.
That users are far more interested in obtaining information than in processing transactions on mobile devices is not surprising, considering the devices' inherent barriers to data entry. "Try punching in a URL on your cell phone," said Jay Gabany, director of travel applications at GetThere. "You'll throw it down, stomp on it and never try it again."
"In North America, more people use it for flight information, which gets 180,000 hits weekly," said Larry Atwell, director of business development for AT&T Wireless Services. "People are finding out if their flights are on time, their gates and where to get their baggage."
In addition to the airlines, travel management companies are providing disruption alerts, gate information, weather and itineraries via mobile devices--in some cases by taking feeds from the GDSs or such vendors as TRX.
Sabre in July released mobile itinerary and destination information through its Virtually There Web site and its GetThere unit actually owns space for the same information on the phone-based home pages of Bell Mobility, Sprint and Verizon. Galileo and Worldspan have a number of similar initiatives in place.
"Once enrolled for notification, the traveler is using that technology on every trip," said Galileo vice president of corporate and consumer sales John Hach. "With the push technology, we see 100 percent instant adoption, and the feedback is nothing short of phenomenal." Asked about usage, Hach said, "the base numbers are in the thousands of travelers, not hundreds of thousands."
While nearly every technology vendor is providing such information, AT&T's Atwell said the airlines have shown "the most innovation over the past six months." As of January, Northwest Airlines began sending upgrade notifications to elite members via e-mail, PDAs, pagers and wireless phones. The message tells Elite passengers if an upgrade to first class is confirmed, if they have been placed on the standby list or if the cabin is full and an upgrade is not possible. To date, it has sent about 100,000 upgrade notifications.
United was out of the gate early last year in delivering proactive flight notification. It has processed about 250,000 requests for e-updates--covering delays, cancellations and gate information sent to PDAs, WAP-enabled cell phones, pagers and e-mail--since it launched the service in January 2000. Flight notification is part of United Update, a suite of wireless offerings accessible through WAP phones at ua2go.com.
American Airlines last month unveiled its proactive flight notification. Like United's, the service provides updates via e-mail, certain cell phones, pagers and PDAs. Unlike United, however, American offers the option of voice messaging as well as text. A similar service at Northwest also involves either text or voice flight status notifications.
United was one of the first U.S. carriers to enter the wireless realm, providing basic information via Palm devices in early 1999. Such capabilities as viewing schedules, flight status and frequent flyer account information have been emulated by most major carriers and also are available on WAP phones. Frontier Airlines is one smaller carrier offering such services; Southwest Airlines has yet to enter the game.
The same basic information is all that Delta Air Lines, a carrier cautious about bringing new technologies to market too early, makes available through its entire range of wireless services. "Viewing that information and your itinerary on your cell phone or PDA has been the cornerstone of our strategy since the fall of 1999," said Rob Casas, general manager for e-business development. "Now we're building on that."
Alaska, which also offers basic information on wireless devices, said usage has been very low, representing less than 1 percent of total traffic on its Web site.
"Right now, wireless is a little over-hyped," said Steve Jarvis, Alaska's vice president of e-commerce. "But it will be the next thing coming to mainstream." Nevertheless, Alaska, building on the success of its Internet checkin service, this month began a beta test of wireless checkin. At this point, frequent flyers involved in the testing still must visit an express kiosk at the airport to obtain a boarding pass. However, Jarvis said the end-game will involve bar-coded frequent flyer cards and not boarding passes.
Most carriers are waiting until a truly paperless mechanism for wireless checkin becomes viable, but Swissair and British Airways, facilitated by IBM, offer limited remote checkin capabilities via WAP phones. BA's service also includes a graphical seat selection option.
Internationally, wireless rollouts by U.S. carriers have stumbled over such roadblocks as inconsistent cell phone networks. United, however, provides wireless messaging and proactive flight notification for customers in the United Kingdom. Those services soon will be expanded to other international markets.
Meanwhile, new booking-related services are surfacing. Northwest late last month introduced wireless access to info on rebooked flights. The service enables e-ticketed travelers using Web-enabled cell phones to confirm the flight on which they have been proactively rebooked, or choose one of three other flight options.
"Travelers tell us that the ability to change a flight, be it on a corporate fare or whatever, has great utility," said Al Lenza, Northwest vice president of distribution planning. "It still is really a toss-up, whether calling a human is faster or not, but these transactions have the potential to catch on quickly." Northwest, like a few other carriers, such as Continental Airlines, for now has opted not to pursue initial booking via PDAs or cell phones to supplement existing distribution channels. "The phones still are clunky and it takes time to execute a detailed transaction," Lenza said. "We are looking at high-value services with a minimum number of keystrokes, but do not see the demand for wireless booking."
Bucking the trend, United in November launched initial booking capability for published fares through Web-enabled cell phones, including seat assignment requests.
A month before that, Dollar Thrify Automotive Group announced wireless booking via Palm Pilots or similar devices for Thrifty Car Rental. The company's Dollar Rent a Car division introduced the same service March 7. At press time, no other car rental firms had entered the game.
Hotel companies, too, are sending information to mobile devices. Swissôtel Hotels & Resorts last summer rolled out the capability to obtain directions to its properties on Internet-enabled cell phones and PDAs. Swissôtel's usage has been modest, but it's growing. "The hotels are able to customize information travelers find of value," said Michelle Woodley, vice president of distribution. "It might be traffic alerts, restaurant promotions or the availability of sports tickets that the concierge becomes aware of."
Choice Hotels International followed suit in October, focusing on PDAs and aiming to get customers to book rooms.
However, said Gary Thomson, Choice Hotels senior vice president and CIO, "The cell phone's tiny screen doesn't lend itself to making reservations at a hotel company with as many brands as Choice." Choice instead opted to focus on PDAs because of their larger screens.
As with airfares, room rates available for booking on wireless devices do not tend to be corporate negotiated rates. But even companies that specialize in corporate booking have encountered obstacles to making corporate fares available.
Usage of Sabre's mobile services for BTS, rolled out by 20 corporations, "has not been huge," said Cindy Groner, director of mobile travel services. Sabre charges under $10 per user per month for capabilities including rebooking and new bookings that are tied to travel policy. One drawback is that in rebooking, the system can only search for the lowest fare, rather than by schedule as can the desktop version of BTS.
With GetThere, Palm VII and Internet phone users can view existing reservations and make changes. One feature that cuts down on navigation is Instant Sign-on, which allows users to enter an assigned 10-digit number into a cell phone's mini browser to set up cell-phone cookies that identify the user and enable the phone to quickly access the corporate version of GetThere. Here again, corporate preferencing and fare filtering is limited.
"One challenge has been that we only allow people to rebook in the same class of service and for the same city pair," said Gabany. "It stems from the challenges of displaying information for the right decision and a challenge we have in interpreting GDS-based fare rules." Because the service is not parallel to what GetThere offers on the broader Internet, GetThere has been waiving its one-time, $5,000 fee for mobile services.
Along similar lines, Galileo's mobile tool only allows rebooking in the same class.
On the expense side, Irvine, Calif.-based Wallet Ware offers Palm OS-based out-of-pocket expense data capture that can upload to customized Microsoft Excel expense reports. Wallet Ware also has partnered with Gelco and Necho to feed data into their expense software. Wallet Ware began offering expense data capture in 1993 on the now-obsolete Apple Newton PDA. After peaking with 25,000 users on that platform, Wallet Ware now has half that number on the Palm OS with growth rates in the double digits.
Extensity, meanwhile, is on the verge of launching a cell phone-based mechanism for inputting out-of-pocket expenses and loading them into the Extensity software. A beta begun in November involved seven clients. Extensity's Palm-based application, which has been out for six months, now has nine customers with less than 3,000 users.
"Travel companies have become very cautious about wireless travel," said Ken Smith, an analyst at PhoCusWright, a Sherman, Conn.-based research firm. "They're saying, 'show me first' because they've seen too much vaporware." In part because there are so many questions about which platforms will win in the mobile game, many travel vendors are turning to third-party developers for help, rather than spending excessive internal resources.
United, for example, develops core applications in-house and then relies on "industry experts" to make them available on multiple mobile and wireless devices used by customers. "We believe in doing what we do best and letting other people do what they do best," said Niru Shah, director of e-commerce systems for United NetWorks, a division of United NetVentures, a wholly owned subsidiary of UAL Corp.
Northwest does much of its development internally and outsources some work to Lake Mary, Fla.-based Kinetics, which is part-owned by Worldspan. Lenza said investment in wireless development need not be overly large. "Our programmers tell us it is cheaper and faster to develop the wireless Web than the traditional Web," he said.
IBM, meanwhile, helped Delta execute the initial rollout of flight status and flight information on wireless devices. The carrier now is working with the Delta Technologies Group to make determinations on new partnerships. America West and Alaska continue to use San Jose-based Everypath for wireless developments.
But some travel tech vendors are putting their own resources into mobile. "We had a team of three or four developers working on our WAP application for three months," said Nathan Gold, director of wireless and mobile marketing development for Extensity. "But we had most of the back-end processes already in place because of our app server. Since we were a ground-up Internet application, we were able to use a lot of the original programming.