Waiting For Gen-Next Tools

<B>Waiting For Gen-Next Tools</B>

In Samuel Beckett's classic existential play, "Waiting for Godot," two tramps wait on a desolate road for a man who never arrives. Many observers in the industry feel the same way about second-generation corporate self-booking tools. How will new products differ from current offerings? Will they help drive adoption? When will they come, or have they already arrived?

To answer these questions, one needs to understand the new ways travelers will interact with self-booking tools, as well as the important changes in the plumbing behind these systems.


<B>It's All In The Plumbing</B>

Datalex's Book It! Matrix, XOL's XML-TS, TRX's xDS and KDS' Wave middleware are examples of a significant architectural trend in self-booking technology. Middleware is defined as software that acts as glue, connecting two otherwise separate applications together, allowing data to pass between them.

Traditionally, creating software that connected a Web interface to the global distribution system transaction engine has involved the use of application-programming interfaces. APIs were developed by the GDS to allow software vendors to write code that works with standard transaction formats. To further advance this concept, the four GDS vendors have used Extensible Markup Language to standardize and simplify the communication between the mainframe and the Web self-booking tool.

Middleware is playing an important role in the way self-booking vendors treat the communication between their application and the mainframe. The goal is to treat all the GDSs as a data source by creating a standard layer across all platforms. This further opens up the possibility of receiving data directly from other sources, such as the Web or direct supplier connections. Think of it this way: Traditional self-booking technology involves a single conversation between a Web client and a mainframe application. This conversation is limited by the information available from the mainframe. In a middleware-enabled environment, the conversation can occur between the Web client and multiple applications simultaneously. The bottom line effect of the middleware layer is to redefine the GDS information as one of many potential data sources rather than the only data source for the transaction.


<B>Second Generation User Interfaces</B>

2001 has seen the arrival of second-generation self-booking tools characterized by two trends:

<CENTER><I>Planning-Based Systems</I></CENTER>

One approach has been to create a front-end planning environment tied to a personal information management application, such as Microsoft Outlook. These applications automatically generate itineraries that conform to a corporation's policies and a traveler's personal preferences. XOL's MyTrip.com was the first product to introduce this technology to the market and implementations of the application are just beginning. A number of other vendors either are licensing the MyTrip.com technology or building similar interfaces. Whether the traveler will accept recommended itineraries without going through the search process is yet unknown and may dictate the ultimate success of this concept.

<CENTER><I>Dynamic Travel Management</I></CENTER>

Another more ambitious approach puts a sophisticated reasoning engine in front of the process, filtering information from the GDS, or other sources, to provide a weighted ranking of recommended itineraries. An example of this approach is the new Yatra product that evaluates a traveler's preferences, role and trip purpose as a filter to recommend the best itinerary. This represents a radical change from traditional systems that regurgitate GDS responses and simply filter them by policy parameters. The Yatra system ranks and sorts travel options based on the employee's role in the organization and the business purpose of the trip. To accomplish this, Yatra has built a complex rules engine that weighs the various personal, corporate and supplier criteria to provide a mathematical score for each itinerary choice.

To bring self-booking to the next level of market acceptance, there is a clear need to go beyond the basic availability, price and book metaphor found in most current products. Self-booking technology will only reach critical mass when the experience of using the tool is better than picking up the phone to call an agent or handing the task over to an administrative assistant.

<I>Norm Rose is president of Travel Tech Consulting Inc., a Belmont, Calif.-based travel e-business consulting firm. Parts of this article were excerpted from the July 10, 2001, update of Rose's Corporate Self-Booking Tools: An Analytical Study, published by TravelTechnology.com.