Two business travel agencies and their automation partners claim they have solved the business travel community's biggest gripe and last month separately outlined their solutions for bringing Internet-only fares into managed travel reservations, including data capture.
O'Fallon, Mo.-based Innovative Travel announced its internally developed FareWeasel is now in use by 26 corporate accounts, up from six in December. Meanwhile, Carlson Wagonlit Travel Canada employed Santa Clara, Calif.-based SideStep to customize its travel search application for a single account. CWT would not reveal, but BTN learned that the CWT account is Nortel Networks, which in 2000 booked $345 million in worldwide air travel.
Meanwhile, as Innovative and SideStep turn their attention to selling the technology to other travel distribution companies or corporations—and Innovative said it already is close to two deals with other agencies—such additional developers as Austin, Texas-based Airlink Systems are testing their own versions of similar tools.
"This is a huge marketplace for travel agencies, particularly small to midsize ones, because they don't have the kind of volume deals that can be penalized by not pushing all business to the preferred vendor," said Jon Farrier, new chief information officer for Europe, the Middle East and Africa with TQ3 Travel Solutions and former president of Travel Technologies Group, predecessor of TRX Inc. "Many have also effectively jettisoned their reliance on commissions, so it doesn't matter if the fare is commissionable."
Although similar in their primary functions, CWT's SideStep and Innovative's FareWeasel solve different needs. While FareWeasel offers a traveler interface that can fully automate bookings with the exception of quality control, CWT's service is designed to streamline processes on the agent's desktop, not the traveler's. Key for CWT is that agents now can book online, in one place, certain non-GDS participants, such as charters and consolidators, which they otherwise would have to seek out on individual Web sites or by phone.
FareWeasel compares choices of itineraries from more than 40 Web sites with clients' negotiated fares and other so-called published fares. FareWeasel incorporates pre-loaded traveler profiles, corporate policy and negotiated fares. If the traveler's desired fare is from the Internet but does not achieve a certain level of savings off the negotiated fare—based on historic programs with a given carrier—or if the itinerary violates policy or contains severe restrictions, FareWeasel's mid-office tool redirects the traveler to the negotiated fare. After the traveler reconfirms a choice, FareWeasel processes the booking at the fare's source and populates the back office for data capture and traveler documentation.
"There's no doubt that in certain sites it's more cumbersome than in the GDS," acknowledged Innovative president and owner Howard Klepser. "We have a dedicated unit that handles such situations." Quality control and post-ticketing service are handled by Innovative's agents using the fare's source site. The agency also provides clients with a complete Web-based reporting package.
In FareWeasel's first month of use, 27 percent of the tickets customers booked were from the Internet among a mix of Web sites, Klepser said. "It fluctuates, and it could be affected by the promotional fare inventory out there, but that's much higher than I expected, which was more like 15 percent," he said.
Twelve-year-old Innovative, which books under $50 million in air travel for nearly 100 small to midsize corporate clients, is charging them $5 for online bookings and $10 for agent-assisted ones, without set-up, implementation or other administrative fees. FareWeasel currently books only domestic one-ways and roundtrips, but Klepser plans to add multi-leg and international support this quarter.
CWT's arrangement required the creation within Nortel's dedicated call center of a "fare research desk," to which all traveler reservations are sent for the purposes of comparison. The desk's Internet browsers are enhanced with the SideStep plug-in—a small piece of software—which pulls information from more than 100 Web sites. If the desk finds an alternative fare deemed worthy of purchase based on price and restrictions, travelers are offered the option to take it.
"In a majority of cases we can issue the ticket ourselves or secure it through a third party," said Stephen Cassidy, a global director for CWT Canada. In some instances, though, agents would direct travelers to the Web site to book themselves, notifying them that they are forfeiting CWT's en route services.
Asked whether he sees CWT rolling out the product to the remainder of its client base, Cassidy acknowledged the cost challenge: "We're considering how we might do that, but there are certainly some additional costs that need to be evaluated," he said. Much of the customization Brampton, Ontario-based Nortel bought from SideStep was designed to create links to five consolidators and charter airlines to which SideStep did not already connect its consumer product.
Also for the agent's desktop, Airlink Systems is now beta-testing its WebAgent tool, which enables customized queries of multiple sites within the Internet browser. According to Airlink president Dick Gintz, user names and passwords are transmitted from the traveler's GDS profile to facilitate bookings on the chosen fare's origin site. WebAgent then mimics a GDS booking for the purposes of data collection in the back office.
Asked about en route support, Gintz said travel agents would support travelers "by proxy" working with the Web site in question. That's how FareWeasel works as well. Agents acting as travelers may sound like an odd way around, but as Klepser put it, for many business travel agencies, "This is Waterloo, the final battle."
Corporate self-booking vendors also have looked into developing such searching techniques. TRX has long enabled ResAssist booking product to hit Web sites to augment GDS fares (BTN, July 10, 2000), but the traveler must book on the Web site and use its customer service. Although most ResAssist clients have that feature turned on, said chief technology officer Steve Reynolds, only about 5 percent of tickets go that route. "We're also in the process of wiring an Internet fare search feature as part of the low-fare search process in EnCoRRe," TRX's mid-office tool, said Reynolds. "We hit about 15 airlines right now."
For I:FAO, owner of the Powertrip and Cytric corporate self-booking tools, "We'll probably put in a companion product that can scan Web fares and represent them in a different window," said Bill McFarlane, head of business development and strategy for I:FAO. "It's sexy to have, but we don't think its practical use will be very great."
According to Mark Orttung, vice president of product marketing for GetThere, a Sabre subsidiary based in Menlo Park, Calif., such Web searches "don't work out as a long-term solution. We need to address the business process first." He said that since airlines are more flexible with such fares if they are booked on their own Web sites, "truly integrated direct connections" will help to answer the question on business process. A GetThere spokesman said the company is "very close" to publicly rolling out a non-GDS connection with an airline "that involves some of the new business philosophies we're talking about," said a spokesman.
Still, "there will be announcements of a number of robotic tools accessing Web fares during the first half of this year," said Norm Rose, president of Belmont, Calif.-based Travel Tech Consulting. "But the issue is much more one of business practice than it is about technology. Any travel manager who sits down with an airline and doesn't try to pressure for access to these fares is really missing the trend here."
Look for Part Two of Web Fares in BTN's Feb. 11 issue.