Amadeus Americas and Travelport GDS are poised to begin wider testing of their new agent point-of-sale desktop tools following more than a year's worth of development and technology integration. Meanwhile, travel technology firm Farelogix also is planning the release of its multisource agent desktop, which targets the midsize and regional agency market.
This next generation of desktop tools scrap the cryptic green-screen environment in favor of primarily graphical user interfaces that purport to enable agents to use multisource content with greater customization capabilities and increase productivity by, for example, bringing some mid-office quality control functions up to the point of sale and handling multiple passenger name records from different corporations.
This month, Amadeus announced plans to release a new desktop designed specifically for the North American corporate market, which the company expects to begin testing with launch travel management company partners in the first half of 2010, with a broader rollout in the second half of next year.
Amadeus' Boston-area development team has been working on Amadeus One during the past year by building on top of and integrating with Amadeus technologies like its profile management system, scripting and command engines and the Amadeus Selling Platform.
Competitor Travelport GDS's Universal Desktop currently is in usability testing with a mix of about 10 multinational and regional corporate and leisure agencies in Africa, Australia, the United Kingdom and United States, according to senior manager of product management Richard Bryant.
Travelport expects to begin tests in the second quarter of next year with a wider deployment after July.
Farelogix in November plans to enter the fray with the release of its latest agent desktop endeavor, the multinational, multicurrency Spark. The initial rollout will be in Canada followed by other points of sale in the first quarter of 2010.
Spark is built on Farelogix's Hawkeye open development methodology and links into its new profile management and records database systems, which use an application programming interface to link to other data sources and content providers. The downloadable desktop is being tested with three midsize agencies, including one in Germany, according to Farelogix president and CEO Jim Davidson. Like the company's other Hawkeye-developed applications and tools, Spark is available for free. "We are competing in an environment where for the most part agencies have home-grown systems or a GDS's system," Davidson said. "We are not going to extract any license fee revenue from something that is already out there for free or something that they've already invested in."
While its GDS competitors have built entirely new desktops, whether through Amadeus' integration with current technology or Travelport's April purchase of technology and intellectual property from G2 SwitchWorks
(BTNonline, April 28, 2008), Sabre has stuck to its plan to continue building new capabilities into its MySabre platform, including multisource content through its Sabre NetCheck tool.
"Certainly we've seen the announcements by our competitors," said Sabre Travel Network senior vice president Chris Kroeger. "We have capabilities in the market today that represent some of the things they are talking about doing. When people talk about multisource tools, MySabre has been multisource for several years now."
He added, "Our platform today, which we've had in place and been investing in for many years, accomplishes many of the things that our competitors are bringing to market, so I can assure you that in a year when those guys do deliver those capabilities they are talking about, we are going to be ahead because we are building on a foundation that is already there."
Although much of the technology integration needed to provide multisource content through a single desktop is being built, such as the ability for agents to search one GDS using another's cryptic code, the endgame also relies on commercial agreements between GDSs. For some products and services, the GDSs have agreements with each other, such as those governing their online booking tools pulling content from other GDSs. In the case of the desktops, as in other agreements, "every GDS is going to want to have reciprocity," said Travelport GDS president and CEO Gordon Wilson.
Yet, in Kroeger's view, one GDS's desktop product booking another's content may not be the best-case scenario, especially with the vast majority of TMCs around the world being single-GDS shops.
"What people are trying to solve is having access to all the content they need," Kroeger said. "For corporations and TMCs, that is what this is about. They're saying, 'Can I have a desktop that brings all the content I need? My preference is to get as much of that content through a single source as I can and complement that with some other sources.' "
For large multinational agencies that use multiple GDSs, a multi-GDS agreement could be a better fit, Kroeger added.
"It's in those situations where absolutely we have an openness and certainly had dialogue and advancements with certain TMCs to talk about how to make their environment and how we can play in that," Kroeger said. "Certainly, from a reciprocity perspective, absolutely we are open to that, because it's about solving an operational issue. The idea of turning multi-GDS across the entire base, we don't think that is where the value and the applicability of multi-GDS is."
Some large multinational travel management companies have taken matters into their own hands by using their own resources to develop proprietary desktop systems.
HRG North America executive vice president of technology Ted Brooks has overseen some development of HRG's proprietary desktop solution now testing in Europe (see story, page 16).
While the project has taken considerable resources, has undergone several testing phases and still is not complete, Brooks said it was necessary for the travel management company to build its own system to give a "certain amount of nimbleness and flexibility that otherwise we wouldn't have. We don't want a point of sale that is built as a least-common-denominator-type solution."