Galileo at next month's National Business Travel Association conference will debut a corporate travel self-booking tool developed with the help of launch client IBM. Users of Travelport's existing system will begin migrating to the new product, called Traversa, in the fourth quarter of this year following the start of a 16-nation rollout at IBM.
Traversa will replace what's known as Travelport Classic and an earlier Galileo self-booking system that IBM was using before Galileo bought the Highwire tool that became Travelport Classic. Traversa will not impact Orbitz Worldwide's Orbitz for Business or Travelport for Business offerings, but Orbitz Worldwide will have a non-exclusive role in co-marketing Traversa outside the United States. Galileo officials said Traversa would be available in six languages by year-end.
Galileo by Travelport vice president of Americas product development Michael Ihle said Travelport Classic clients would have a "relatively long time window" in which to migrate to the new product. "We will take their profiles and have a conversion tool that puts them into Traversa," he added. "There are only a couple small things, which most people don't use, that we will not be migrating."
Orbitz Worldwide last month revealed that Orbitz and Travelport had entered into a number of technology agreements ahead of the former's initial public offering. While the nascent Orbitz global technology platform and long-established supplier link booking connections were mentioned as parts of those deals, Ihle said they are not related to the new Traversa tool. Traversa was "entirely coded by Galileo programmers," said Ihle, noting that development started early last year.
The new system relies heavily on Java in an effort to blend the "matrix" look and consumer feel of Orbitz with corporate policy indicators and configurable administrative options enabling travel managers to adapt the system for their companies' needs.
Officials highlighted "unique" features including automated unused e-ticket tracking and exchanging (available on Apollo-connected systems only), a lowest logical airfare parameter, single-page airport comparisons, seat selection earlier in the process and "qualified searching" that displays only prices which are truly available for booking. They also noted that the tool's data entry methods expedite the selection of cities and airports by using Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, an increasingly popular development technique that automatically loads small amounts of data (in this case, airport and city codes) into pages so they don't have to be retrieved by reloading a browser page.
Galileo said it expects clients to enjoy lower transaction fees, lower fares, higher adoption, greater productivity and improved supplier relationships. Dave Falter, president of Galileo by Travelport in the Americas, said agency users are "very eager" to make the switch on behalf of their corporate clients.
As for connectivity, Traversa works with the Apollo and Galileo global distribution systems, as well as non-GDS content through application programming interfaces and screen scraping. There are currently no plans to add other GDS sources.
Ihle, meanwhile, made a point to say the new product is better connected with Galileo than is Sabre's GetThere system, which won many Galileo-connected customers early in its development because Galileo did not have an equivalent product.
Commenting on a separate development in which Hewlett-Packard--which was one of those Galileo-using GetThere customers when it first rolled out online booking in the late 1990s--switched this year to Concur's Cliqbook, a GetThere spokesperson indicated that, "In the last eight months alone, 25 multinational companies cumulatively representing more than $1.2 billion in ARC [transaction volume] signed renewal agreements to use GetThere."
Galileo officials declined to comment on pricing for Traversa.
Excluding proprietary systems developed by travel management companies, the key existing corporate online booking tools include Cliqbook (Concur), e-Travel (Amadeus), GetThere (Sabre), KDS, Resx (TRX), Travelport (Galileo) and Trip Manager (Worldspan).