TRX late last month unveiled an enhanced version of its ResX online booking tool, sporting a user interface that simplifies and speeds airline ticket, hotel room and rental car bookings.
ResX Technologies president Shane Hammond said that the latest upgrade increases usability and enhances interaction, but that it's only one of several steps the company expects to take. "In next 30 days, you'll see us make announcements regarding integrations with multiple expense management providers," he said. In another two months, TRX plans to integrate the new TravelTrax product
(BTN, March 5) so that it becomes the ResX reporting engine, "which will allow us to do things like bring agency back-office feeds into the data set and help them with online booking adoption," Hammond continued. "Another integration we will announce in the next 60 to 90 days is with an auto-ticketing component that leverages the Correx platform. We could not announce the things that we are about to without us having done this prior, but this is only a stepping stone."
The new interface replaces a text-heavy and slower one, so in effect this change brought it up to competitive standards.
To some extent the move is just window dressing, but window dressing is serious business for online booking tools, for which even potentially useful information and functions can be seen as clutter and an obstacle to usage. Hammond agreed that to some degree the new user interface is about striking a balance between useful information and clutter, but also said it is about using Web 2.0 Ajax technologies to customize the user interface. "The user can do that using a combination of clicks to select what they want to see—which we call advanced sorting functionality. They also can do it in the setup," he said.
In many ways, the new interface brings to mind the interfaces of Travelocity Business and Expedia Corporate Travel. "They're trying to emulate those guys, who spent millions on the whole user interface design, so why not just steal a page from their design book?" said Steve Reynolds, vice president of technical solutions for travel management consulting firm Management Alternatives and a former TRX senior executive.
"They spent money on the design and the user interface," he said. "The interface that they had before this change was the one we had when the product was first released five years ago. They did some minor stuff to it—sped it up, made a few little tweaks. My impression was we kind of missed the mark in terms of the interface when we first released it. Now that the interfaces have settled into a standard, they just followed suit. It definitely looks better and it definitely is faster, but is it a leap ahead of the competition? Probably not. Is it at par? I think so."
Hammond responded that "all the user interfaces of all the corporate travel booking engines are seeking to become more user-friendly to some extent, to replicate that consumer experience, but what we've done is less like Expedia Corporate Travel and more like Expedia.com, a true consumer site. It's not even a business traveler experience. It's really a leisure experience that we are aiming for."
Hammond said that the latest version of ResX is the culmination of over a year of distributor and end-user feedback, including blind studies and "about a dozen agencies that were involved in the beta process and gave us feedback on every nuance, including the placement of a button, the treatment of an approval e-mail, and the way that we might display a hotel option in and out of travel policy."
According to a TRX press release, "ResX v6.3 enables users to request air options by price or by schedule, all from the main page. The new interface provides live updates during the search process, displaying additional travel or policy information as search results appear on the screen. With ResX v6.3, users can now create a policy-compliant, roundtrip air reservation with four clicks and in less than 90 seconds."
ResX enhancements in the past few years include the integration of Web fares, addition of policy management tools and construction of its Web services architecture.
ResX claims about 2,500 corporate travel accounts and global online booking marketshare of 7 percent to 8 percent.