I read your entry and found out many interesting points there. I agreed with you most of the points.
At the beginning 2009 until now, business travel was going down and we faced with many problems because of the economy crisis. It seems business travel is going better. We have more and more clients sending their reservations for their trips but it’s a bit slow. I do hope it’s better from 2010 onward.
I found that Travel port have had many great long term strategy. I like it very much.
I am also working in Business Travel…

Kind regards!

Phung

Thanks for taking the time to comment. Let me respond briefly to the points you’ve raised. On the subject of “seeing is believing” – your point is well made. As I said in my blog, we’re well advanced with the development of Travelport Universal Desktop, our future agency desktop solution. In fact, just this week at the NBTA conference in San Diego, we were in a position to preview a working prototype with some of our major customers and the media.

This is way beyond a concept, it’s a tangible product that we intend to roll out in 2010. However, we’re not there yet – and none of our competitor GDS providers are either. But we’re all working hard to bring to market next-generation solutions that truly deliver the graphical and merchandising capabilities our supplier and agency customers are seeking.

Travelport is putting a lot of focus on testing and refining through the alpha and beta development phases to make sure that our eventual full commercial release fully reflects the needs of our customers. That’s what I would call “walking the talk”. I get the sense that you feel we’re moving in the right direction, but you’re reserving judgement on whether we will actually execute – which is fair enough - it certainly throws down the gauntlet to us to follow through in delivering our future vision and I am more than happy to pick that gauntlet up.

On the subject of customer service, Travelport has moved a great deal of the basic FAQ element as well as informational aspects of our product and services to interactive, web enabled capabilities for our clients. However, our account management teams as well as our Help Desk are always available telephonically. The account management team make regular outgoing calls to check in with customers to explain new services and capabilities as well as to receive feedback and we hold regular forums for customers in the various regions of the US as well as in our international operations. I am going to have Travis Christ who runs the Americas for us follow up to ensure that you are receiving the full range of services we offer.

On your third and last point, I’d agree that if you don’t deliver what travellers and the agents that serve them need, then your business will inevitably suffer. Travelport’s “reason for being” is to deliver informed choice to travellers throughout the world. That’s why we’re investing in new and future technologies such as our Universal Desktop for the professional travel agency; Traversa, our corporate self booking tool which is implemented by many leading companies, including IBM who have over 250,000 IBMers across 16 countries worldwide using the system, as well as a wide range of smaller corporations; and our investment in the worldwide roll out of e-Pricing to deliver improved shopping and pricing, to name but three.

Travelport is making such investments even in a recessionary time such as this precisely because we seek to ensure that our future is in lock step with that of our customers and the channels through which customers wish to purchase now and tomorrow.

Through these investments and many more like them, I’m confident that Travelport will be well placed to deliver the advances in user experience expected of us by both travel agencies and corporate travel managers. But, as I said in my blog, radical change will require more than the effort of individual GDSs. It also requires a travel industry that is eager to embrace change and new ways of working – and judging by your comments, it sounds that like us, you are fully committed to making this happen!

Thank you again for your response to my blog.
– Gordon Wilson

I am all for updating the systems to a point. However, I have found one very important method of booking no longer available on many graphical websites which has traditionally made a travel agent a better way to book. In the old GDS programs, we see all the inventories available on any one flight, and the number of seats (up to 9) that are available. On the graphical new programs they ask how many passengers and then advise what the “best” price is. If, though, I ask for four seats and there is only one seat available at the lowest price, it will only offer me the lowest price available for all four seats. In other words, I don’t even know that there is a lower price available without asking for only one seat. Most travel agents worth that title will book the best prices for their clients, and that may mean breaking a family’s booking into more that one PNR just to give them that best price. If you can offer that technology, then we are on the right track. I do have a website that I often use to look for the lowest price available, as a comparison to using the “$BBQ” input in Apollo. When there is a lower price for one or two passengers, it tells me so. This is something that “$BBQ” doesn’t offer. I know the airlines want to get the highest price they can, but I don’t want it to be at the expense of my clients.

Thank you.

I cant agree more with this blog. With every threat there comes an opportunity
and very few have vision to identify that opportunity. I am sure Travelport
with the able leadership will surpass the post war HP’s accomplishments.