Worldspan Debuts Business Travel System At TTW

<I>Los Angeles</I> - If the City of Angels is the City of Dreams, then BTN's Travel Tech World '97 show, held here late last month, was the place where the dream of automating the travel process began to materialize. There among already established vendors in this emerging market were their newest versions, new competitors and new corporate buyers scrutinizing their options.

The biggest product launch on the TTW trade show floor was the new Internet/intranet version of "Worldspan for Business Travel," a full end-to-end suite of Internet-based products for the corporate market developed by the Atlanta-based CRS and backed by its airline ownership team of Delta, Northwest and TWA. The first module out of the chute, the Trip Manager automated booking system, will begin beta testing at corporate sites this month. Optimistically, it is scheduled for a general third-quarter release.

In a move obviously designed to encourage volume usage of the system, Worldspan is introducing the system with a flat fee pricing model, rather than charging per reservation booked. Trip Manager will be priced at a rack rate of $75 per user for the first 399 travelers, then $50 per seat after that, up to a corporate maximum of $100,000. A one-time set-up and training fee of $2,500 is also involved.

Another module in the Worldspan for Business Travel suite will handle data warehousing and travel-management reporting, priced separately at a rack rate of $5,000. A quality control and file finishing module for travel agencies will be sold separately, since many agencies already have automated products to handle those functions, Worldspan said. Like its competitors in the corporate travel system market, Worldspan will build interfaces to existing expense-reporting software rather than develop its own product.

Worldspan for Business Travel will be promoted and marketed in a spirit of partnership by Delta, Northwest and TWA, all of whom have agreed not to develop competitive systems of their own, said Worldspan director of emerging markets Pat Crorkin.

Like many industry players, Crorkin said, Worldspan had been working on a client-server-based system when it detected a "dramatic shift" of interest to the emerging Web-based technology. The new Internet version of Trip Manager is based on code developed by Travel Technologies Group, the software arm of Delta's Atlanta neighbor World Travel Partners. But Worldspan has customized the product and "is providing the sales support and training to make it a Worldspan branded solution," he said.

Coming late into a market that competitors like Sabre and Microsoft have been talking to for some months, Worldspan intends to be "very aggressive in both the consumer and the corporate markets," Crorkin added.

At Delta, meanwhile, passenger sales data systems manager Larry Beck acknowledged that the carrier has abandoned its plan to develop a corporate system of its own, a path it was following when Worldspan was focused on the older client-server technology. "When Worldspan began looking for an Internet product, it made sense for us to support their decision," Beck said. "All of the airline partners are embracing this."

Beck declined direct comment on whether the "support" Delta is offering will include air discounts to corporate customers of its automated booking system, as American and United have done. But he emphasized that Delta intends "to be competitive."

So, too, does Northwest, but with the same reluctance, noted newly promoted vice president of distribution planning Al Lenza. "We think the choice of a preferred airline and the choice of an automated booking system are two separate decisions," Lenza said. "But if this bundling is part of the competitive environment, we'll look at it."

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Regarding online commission caps, Sabre BTS marketing manager Dennis Robinson said the CRS has worked out formal agreements with American, Delta, Northwest and United underlining the fact that "online commission caps do not apply to Sabre BTS customers through 1998."

But Northwest's Lenza begged to differ. "We did not say that," Lenza said. "Clearly we will be competitive--but our position is that this channel is not real yet, and we don't know enough yet to make a determination."

Continental, meanwhile, said that while its policy for online and Internet bookings "applies uniformly regardless of the source, we recognize there are special situations and relationships in the corporate sector, we will always be competitive in regard to corporate business, and would perhaps work in other ways with a corporation to give them offsetting or equal advantages in working with Continental versus other carriers" through online commission policies.

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Travel managers, meanwhile, were talking about new models for changing times. Copying the model used by the airlines themselves to draw travelers to their online booking sites, one West Coast company is buying American Airlines miles and offering them to travelers who use their automated booking system and preferred contract vendor, according to travel technology consultant Richard Eastman.

Echoing the concern of many that the corporate booking systems currently on the market "are not yet perfected," travel management consultant Harold Seligman of Stamford, Conn.-based Management Alternatives Inc. cited the unconventional approach to the bid process taken by one of his customers: It selected not one but three finalists from among the bidders on its contract, and pitted them against each other in a 60-day lab test. Suggested by a cross-functional team of eight that has been working on the travel automation project since October, the idea is to use all three systems for nine weeks--three weeks of testing, then three weeks of follow-up, then three weeks of evaluation--before making a decision.

Seligman said the corporation in question processes 150,000 tickets a year, and estimates it can save $100 per trip, counting "the time of the traveler and the time of the agent," by automating the booking, quality control, ticketing and expense reporting processes.

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Even while travel managers are testing the existing systems, the list of potential suppliers continues to grow. The newest player on the trade show floor was TravelGuide Software of Baltimore, a company formed 18 months ago by two travel agencies and four Internet partners, to "develop, build, license and support automated solutions for business travel." Its DirectRes booking product is online at 20 private-labeled agency sites, and DirecTrack T&E, the expense-reporting module, is rolling out this month, said chief executive David Wallis. Partners include Cal Simmons Travel of Northern Virginia, Dynamic Technology Services, Iconix, UUCom.inc and Cornerstone Systems.

Quality Management Systems of Houston, the technology subsidiary of one of the earliest players in the automated booking market, World Wide Travel of Little Rock, was showing its new Internet version, which includes the ability to search for three hotels at once--a feature that prevents users from constantly having to retry hotel choices until they find a room available in this tight market, noted national sales director Grant Caplan. Looking much like the fax-back product Quality Management Systems has long offered, the system brings back a grid of six outbound and six inbound choices when travelers submit a request.

Also on display in L.A. were new versions of existing products, like SATO Travel's new Internet version of its Navigator system. US Airways' Corporate Travel Works, meanwhile, was sporting a spiffy new front end, with a Java application that allows travelers to drag an airplane across a calendar to indicate dates of departure and return, an improvement over the traditional pull-down windows used by most booking systems. That's just one of 200 new features culled from a list of 1,000 suggestions for the system solicited from corporate customers, said US Airways corporate products manager Michael Ihle. Another winner is the addition of a pre-trip authorization capability that allows a manager to set a spending limit in advance, so that if travelers later book their trips in compliance with policy and under budget, the authorization will immediately go through without being rerouted back to the supervisor. Also new is a messaging feature travelers can use to "talk" to their agent, the ability to check both published and corporate fares for "best fare" quotes, a waitlist capability and a data warehousing option.

Speech recognition systems were back on the floor and in the breakouts for the first time since the late Thomas Cook Travel demonstrated an early BBN Hark system in 1994 at NBTA. Pure Speech of Cambridge, Mass., demonstrated an application it is building as a front end to the E-Travel booking system (BTN, March 3), scheduled for debut later this year, that filled in a form on the computer as a traveler spoke into the phone. In a breakout session, Via World Network president Elmer Baldwin booked a one-leg, one-way air ticket in 10 seconds, and claimed Via Voice has achieved 95 percent accuracy in booking air travel for travelers from Via's parent company, Andersen Consulting. But Baldwin also noted that success ratio is much lower when travelers attempt to book hotels, where the choices are so much more plentiful.

IBM director of travel distribution Claude Guay, meanwhile, talked about a new technology that will make voice response systems faster and easier to use (see story, page 1).

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Keynote speaker Richard Barton, travel business unit manager at Microsoft, took a low-key approach to the Internet hype, acknowledging that the dream has a distance yet to run before the systems become a well-functioning reality. "The Internet is not going to happen overnight; it's going to be a long but powerful burn, and it's okay to take your time," he said. His interesting advice, given Microsoft's two-year contract with American Express, for which the clock will begin ticking this July: "Take a long-term view about the partners you choose."

Barton was optimistic, though, about the future of travel technology, citing a recent prediction by Jupiter Communications that half of all Internet commerce in the year 2000 will be travel related. A Microsoft survey of senior managers from 125 Fortune 500 companies attending a Rome demo found that 100 percent already offer their employees e-mail access, 92 percent offer Internet access to an average penetration of 62 percent of their employees, and 80 percent have Intranet servers, he said. Sixty-seven percent are ready to test an automated travel-booking system in the next year, and 15 percent are testing one already.

Barton cautioned buyers against "overreacting with control issues" as they roll out automated booking systems. It will take hand-holding rather than mandates to win travelers over to automated systems.

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Among the new faces on the buyers' side at Travel Tech was Bill Young, vice president of purchasing at Edison Brothers Stores Inc. of St. Louis, newly charged with bidding out and automating the company's $3.5 million air-volume travel management account. Travel was handled by the transportation and logistics department at Edison Brothers until November, when the accounting firm of Ernst & Young, brought in to help the company find its way out of Chapter 11, recommended moving it under the purchasing department. An RFP for agency bids that include an automated booking option is already on the street, Young said.

Another newcomer on the floor wore a badge with the new title of "supplier relations communications manager." Declining an on-the-record interview in her first month with a Corporate Travel 100 company, she said her job is to "design and implement a comprehensive communications program for travel services, including an intranet site, to educate employees on travel choices and to encourage the use of preferred suppliers.