One-On-One With Travelport's Gordon Wilson: GDS Rolling Out Tools
Travelport group deputy CEO Gordon Wilson spoke late last month to BTN contributing editor Amon Cohen about its Universal Desktop, set to launch in July, booking tool Traversa as a product for large corporations only, imminent new booking tool partnerships and plans to resurrect the group's abandoned stock market flotation.
BTN: What is the latest on booking unbundled products through Travelport?
Gordon Wilson: The trend is to unbundle, then rebundle into what are called "fare families." It has been started by Air Canada, with four fare families—Tango, Tango Plus, Latitude and Executive—where the prices for the packages are lower than for buying the same products from an à la carte menu. We have to support all types of unbundling. We are already processing the fare families with Air Canada and put them into Traversa, Travelport's corporate online booking tool, last month.
BTN: What is the underlying technology?
Wilson: There are currently three ways of handling unbundled services. The first is our Options Integrator, which allows us, for example, to book seat assignments on Midwest. The second is the application programming interface, which is how we connect with Air Canada, and the third is industry standards. We have done lots of tests with ATPCo [the body through which airlines file fares in global distribution systems] but not many airlines at the moment are filing unbundled products through these standards.
However, the big solution on the way is the Universal Desktop, our new workstation product, which offers one workflow, one process and one screen display. It is driven by a universal API, so users will be able to get to anything in the GDS, plus connect with any third party. Agents tend to connect to merchandized product through APIs while taking fares from the traditional GDS. This will fuse them together into a sensible compare-and-contrast display so they don't need three or four screens open at once. Universal Desktop will also feed corporate booking tools. We are going to go live with it with Flight Centre [which owns the multinational travel management company FCm] this summer.
BTN: Does the Universal Desktop have implications for corporate clients beyond fare unbundling?
Wilson: I can't get over enough how what we are doing with the universal applications programming interface will enable us to serve up a much wider array of content. Air is a much smaller proportion of corporate travel spending than other items combined.
We will be able to bring these other areas of spend into corporate travel programs much more easily and make it possible to capture the data for them.
We will shortly be putting in connections to other hotel aggregators and adding it to the corporate booking tools we power. We have spent tens of millions of dollars on this, which is something that was jump-started when we bought G2 SwitchWorks. It will make a sea change to the way travel will be booked within a corporation.
BTN: Travelport announced a technology partnership with IBM, the multinational launch customer for Traversa. What's the connection?
Wilson: We developed Traversa in partnership with IBM, which is probably the world's top spender on corporate travel, at a time when it felt no booking tool met its needs. There are now 250,000 IBM travelers booking their travel with Traversa in 16 countries, and IBM will be using it in 70 countries by year-end. We have spent the last few months making Traversa more generic, because a lot of what we built originally was IBM-specific.
BTN: What is the latest on the rollout of Traversa to other clients? What distinguishes it from its competitors?
Wilson: It is in deployment with two more of the world's largest spenders. Our niche appears to be high-end technology and business service companies. People seem to like its shopping cart and matrix displays, like on consumer websites, and it has API content like the Air Canada fare families.
We are going to enter into partnerships with more booking tool providers, like we already have with KDS.
BTN: Why are you doing that now that you have Traversa?
Wilson: Traversa is for large corporations. For others, it may be a sledgehammer to crack a nut. We think it is better to brand a family of solutions than develop three solutions ourselves.
We signed a deal with a booking tool for the Australasian, Asian and European markets a couple of weeks ago and you can expect us to announce something for the U.S. market relatively soon.
BTN: What is the significance for corporate travel buyers in the recently reached technology partnership with IBM?
Wilson: We are spending tens of millions of dollars to more easily connect a great deal of content together and to do it just once for all our systems. It will benefit corporates because it will improve our ability to get at the long tail of content, such as car parking or hotels not currently in the GDSs. It is designed to make us much nimbler than we are already.
BTN: You had to pull your initial public offering in February. Were you simply a victim of bad timing?
Wilson: Yes. A window opened but then the Greek sovereign debt issue made the markets jittery and the window closed.
BTN: Will it be weeks, months or years before you try again?
Wilson: Having been bitten by our advisers getting the market wrong, we want to make sure the window is fully open next time, but I would be disappointed if it was years.
BTN: Travelport and its competitors seem to have concluded recent renegotiations with airlines very smoothly. Did you price generously to get your IPO out, leading to a bloodbath next time around?
Wilson: I don't foresee a bloodbath so much, but I do see a very different relationship between GDSs, airlines and TMCs. Our dialogue with airlines now is much less about cost and much more about how we can help with their revenues. Today, we are commoditizing seats to a degree. Tomorrow, the Universal Desktop will allow airlines to show what you get for the price you pay and make comparisons.