XOL Betas Booking Interface

<B>XOL Betas Booking Interface</B>

By Jay Campbell

Xtra On-Line, the booking vendor aligned with Rosenbluth International and 25 percent owned by Worldspan, is developing an interface to personal information management systems, such as Microsoft Outlook, to ease the booking process for travelers.

Though it first will be available on Xtra's PowerTrip res system, Xtra will market to other booking vendors the interface and its ability to quickly return a full itinerary after travelers input only the dates and addresses of their destinations. Xtra's CEO, Bill Diffenderffer, said the product will go into beta test in August with "a couple big, a couple middle and a couple small" clients.

Officials said the big advancement is in the calendar integration. After the user or his/her IT department downloads a plug-in to Outlook, that software then has a new tab in its calendar module, which users would press to enter the street address of, say, a meeting they were to attend. "You select date parameters, you say you're ready to create a travel plan for those dates, it looks for locations you gave it and starts to do your work," said Chris Bradshaw, vice president of new business development. "It finds personal preferences, all modes of transportation, then consolidates that information and factors in policy, geographic proximity and total travel time to produce a whole trip. When it gets the optimal plan, the page shows you what you've got, and when you click to accept it, it then populates your Outlook calendar with each element."

Users also see Mapquest maps for each leg of the trip and, because they input an exact address, they often are directed to convenient hotels and airports. Travelers can make changes to specific parts of the trip, such as car rental, and can input preferences about things like how late they would want to arrive.

Runzheimer's Rolfe Shellenberger, a longtime advocate of the trip-based model who now is consulting for Xtra, couldn't say enough about the process: "Because it is a complete trip rather than a piece, the traveler will save time," said Shellenberger. "It automatically puts in the hotel and generates commission streams, but more importantly it creates a body of knowledge that describes a trip and prices a trip completely. The GDSs don't lose transaction revenue from cars or hotels booked over the phone, and the travel manager is no longer worried about operational issues and can spend time on negotiating."

Diffenderffer said the next interface after Outlook likely would be on an Internet calendar, such as Anyday.com. Meanwhile, "we've built it to integrate with any booking engine," he said. "We're going public with this at NBTA, and then we expect to talk to a lot of players." He added that Worldspan is "very interested."

Shellenberger said, "There's no reason for other people selling booking solutions not to acquire technology available to them from what amounts to a competitor--I don't think there's any traveler in the world who would disagree with getting everything on one screen. I've been told by BTS they were working on it, but it fell by the wayside because they focused on signing contracts."

At least two key players, E-Travel and GetThere, are initially skeptical. "I can't say we're not doing anything like this," said GetThere spokesman Dan Toporek. "But even if it's a plug-in, one thing that can be scary for a travel manager is having the IS team configure everyone's desktops. We've absolutely scoured through it; the complexity makes it something we're going to investigate heavily." GetThere's recently upgraded Rapid Res service offers trip models in which users enter dates and receive trip templates, he noted.

E-Travel spokesman Rob Wald said, "We don't think there's a high tolerance level for plug-ins. The concept is a very good one--it's the implementation that we're questioning.