Travelport Begins Melding GDS Portfolio

President and CEO of Travelport's global distribution system division Gordon Wilson spoke with Business Travel News editors David Meyer and Jay Boehmer last week about the company's accomplishments and plans following last month's completed Worldspan acquisition.

BTN: How much of Worldspan, Galileo and Apollo do you intend to integrate and how much will you leave separate?

Gordon Wilson: Probably the best way to describe it is the way we have brought together Galileo and Apollo. They use the same fares and shopping capabilities, the same car rental and hotel booking products and leisure products and the same interface into GTA, which works with 23,000 independent hotels. The workstation front end is pretty much the same for both of them. I envisage over time the same thing with Worldspan. We'll make sure our airline partners will only have to have one connection into the three systems. The only thing that stays the same is the very core PNR-generating engine. The reason to keep that the same is that it is very much embedded into the business workflow processes and applications agencies have written in that environment. Over time, as we improve our front end and point of sale, it will be transparent as to which GDS is processing the transaction.

BTN: Do you foresee a time when those names go away, or will you always have different flavors?

Wilson: For the next two or three years, there will be different flavors, because there are some areas of different strengths and weaknesses in the systems for different market segments. Worldspan has a much better profile and capability in the online travel agency marketplace, and Galileo has a much better portfolio and presence in the multinational TMC arena. You don't want to androgynize the product lines if there is no benefit to the customer. As we align the product sets, the first phase will be as I've described, but over a few years, it will be irrelevant as to which core is being used.

BTN: You said the number-one goal is to complete the organizational alignment. Regarding the integration of the products, do you plan to have the front end completed in the next four months?

Wilson: No, the front end is the last bit that we'll do. The main focus at the moment is on making sure that we operate the same cashing system across the two GDSs, that we move to the same fares and shopping engine and the same car hire and hotel booking products. Those will be the first priority. The common front end to the GDSs isn't as high a priority, and I doubt that we will put that in place to 2008. There's no burning desire for that from the customer base. They are more keen to have the best-in-breed fares, shopping, hotel and car booking experience, taking the best of Galileo and the best of Worldspan and fusing them together.

BTN: How long do you expect there to be different content in the different GDSs?

Wilson: For as little time as possible. There are some things that we have to work out there, as you might imagine, legally. Through our supplier community relationships, to end up with one agreement with one Travelport that then pipes them in to three different systems on an equal basis, that helps streamline commercial relationships and the technical connectivity that the supplier has and enriches both of our systems. We've done that before. That's exactly what we did when we put Galileo and Apollo together. Our supplier customers today have one contact and one connectivity for both Galileo and Apollo. That's where we envisage going with Worldspan, which would augment it with the richer content that Galileo has today.

BTN: Will you need to go back to the suppliers to change the two contracts into one?

Wilson: It will vary. You have a big group of customers who have standardized contracts. They are kind of an easy group. Then you have a smaller set of customers who have longer-term agreements with us that might not be the same between Galileo and Worldspan. We will be working with each carrier individually in that scenario, but we've got more than 500 airlines in our system and numerous hotel companies. It's in their interest as well as ours to streamline the process.

BTN: Galileo has some agreements that Worldspan doesn't, such as with Virgin America and Southwest. How soon can Worldspan subscribers access that content?

Wilson: We hope that will be just a matter of months.

BTN: What is a reasonable timeframe to achieve content parity for Travelport owned channels?

Wilson: We should be all done within a year, max. It's something that is of prime priority for us. Having content parity also enables us to streamline the product set.

BTN: How quickly can Galileo use the Worldspan Rapid Reprice functionality?

Wilson: That's a high priority. It's a very nice piece of functionality and would be an obvious enhancement to Galileo. I would envisage that by early in the first quarter of next year we should be up and live. To roll it out across different countries, we have to go through bank settlement plan certification.

BTN: Which other functionalities and assets are you getting from Worldspan?

Wilson: Some of what Worldspan has done around its shopping capability, which is particularly pertinent in the online marketplace, is very good and we seek to harness the best we can of that. I like some of the things that Worldspan has done in terms of merchandising on its car product, which enables the car hire company to upgrade or upsell to the user. Worldspan has got some quite good technology in terms of its Go suite of lower-cost-to-serve products. There is a whole variety of things, but also on the other side there is all the good stuff that Galileo has done which Worldspan can benefit from. We've made a major move forward recently with Air Canada, whereby we've announced we'll be the first to market with a fully fledged product enabling access to all of Air Canada's content, including Tango and Tango Plus fares, to be available on the travel agency desktop. That also allows us to do some things in the corporate market, such as flight passes, which for TMCs in Canada has been a pain to deal with. Now they'll be able to book them at the desktop with this application, which will roll out with Air Canada by the end of the year.

BTN: It seems there's been some backlash against Galileo's approach to Air Canada. Is that a carrier-specific initiative or a new approach for the industry?

Wilson: I think the backlash, such as it is, may be sour grapes from some of our competitors because we are first out to market with a viable product because of investments that we've made. Virtually every low-cost carrier that you connect to now, you connect to via an API. Those carriers don't operate on the same kinds of host reservation systems that the more established airlines operate. They're built outside of them in .Net and Java applications. This is much more about merchandising products and upselling to the customer. It used to be that the price you paid was dependent on when you bought your ticket. Those days are gone. It's one-way faring on the short-haul domestic marketplace increasingly, and if you want a seat assignment, you have to pay extra, and if you don't check a bag, you get money off. That intelligence isn't built within the airlines' host reservations system, it's built outside of it, and the way to get to that is through blending API and traditional GDS connectivity.

Not every airline will do it the Air Canada way, but that's OK. We've built our technology so that we can deal with that.

BTN: Amadeus and Sabre launched their joint venture for non-air payment. Are you thinking about getting into that business?

Wilson: Yes, that type of business would make a lot of sense to do at an industry level. It's something the industry needs and would improve the industry all around. It's really a business that benefits from huge scale and a global footprint. What they seem to be proposing is very sensible and it would be interesting to see if that could be made into an industrywide capability.

BTN: In other words, you would join in with them?

Wilson: There are all sorts of ways to do it, but we wouldn't discount if they were willing for us to work with them, and we wouldn't discount doing something different but in the same space. That's something that we are actively in dialogue about at the moment.

BTN: What will you see as the measure of success?

Wilson: Three things, starting obviously with growth. We're also about thought leadership in this ever-evolving distribution medium, such as what we've done in working with airlines differently, like with Air Canada and how we got Southwest to work with us. Maintaining the status quo is not particularly attractive to us as a company. And obviously at the end of the day, I need to delight my customers, suppliers and owners.