// Travel 2.0 Mashery | The Vision

Travel 2.0 Mashery is a Travel 2.0 | Strategy + Business' own extended definition and vision of Travel 2.0 as coined by Philip C. Wolf, President and CEO, PhoCusWright Inc. Travel 2.0 Mashery is meshing up the Travel 2.0 | Strategy + Business team’s collective years of experience from traditional travel distribution method to online distribution strategies; combined with our best-of-breed emerging travel & tourism technology automation portfolio; from third-party global partners network as well as our own proprietary travel portal builder called Mashlabs.Travel, a buy/sell trading ecosystem network. Which allow supplier-members of any size to build and issue their own custom Push XML/API to economically distribute their inventory or negotiated rates.

Mashlabs.Travel has paved the way to unifying or mashing up GDS and non-GDS based travel products, services and contents inventory into an efficient and economical B2B travel & tourism trading ecosystem using an open-source service oriented architecture (SOA) technology. GDS based legacy travel inventory has been limited to airlines, cars, hotels and cruises, while adventure or experiential tour package products and other niche travel categories such as airport transfers, day tour activities, yacht charters, private jet charters, entertainment tickets, dining reservations, Travel SOS, small and boutique accommodation properties has been and still are considered highly fragmented product categories, which currently aren’t dynamically package with GDS legacy based contents. Mashlabs.Travel framework provides foundation for B2B buyers to source the right products and services, from budget, moderate, luxury to ultra-luxury instantaneously, in real-time; and sellers to distribute its inventory at low entry cost or without large upfront investment in technology automation.

Mashlabs.Travel portal builder’s built-in customizable Products Catalogue and Shopping Cart allows GDS and non-GDS based product categories to be dynamically packaged together. The portal builder comes with Internet, Intranet and Extranet user interfaces to create unlimited number of distribution channel. Traditional booking engine has many limitations in terms of flexibility and it does not come with built-in CMS portal, nor have capabilities to aggregate non-GDS suppliers content via Extranet access for self-service inventory upload and management. While Mashlabs.Travel 2.0 Portal Builder comes with unified CMS, CRM and ERP framework, which allows any size of third-party suppliers to be part of an ecosystem at low entry cost or no cost at all, be it directly to Mashlabs.Travel portal or clients portal. Suppliers content data migration and integration method includes, 1) Extranet browser data entry, 2) SDK with OLAP, ETL and Excel based XML data mapping using Flash triggered real-time synchronization to suppliers own database, 3) XML / API based web services.

Booking both legacy based and highly fragmented travel and tourism contents inventory as one package requires considerable amount of time of research resources from agent and consumer alike. Travel 2.0 | Strategy + Business’ Mashlabs.Travel proprietary technology platform mashups’ with global technology partners’ platforms and suppliers has created a foundation in building a truly SOA based travel B2B trading ecosystem called tripXML. tripXML is a Travel XML Registry Marketplace, an Open API Marketplace for business-to-business to efficiently and economically buy/sell travel products, similar to how NASDAQ trades financial instruments and services. The results, Mashlabs.Travel and its user community can easily and economically custom build an array of unified user booking interfaces from browser based, mobile to widgets, for corporate, leisure, group and call center travel applications. This could lead to the creation of next generation Calendar and Data Mapping driven Interactive Visual Booking Interface with drag-able airport/city origination to drop into certain country-map (link only serves as part of conceptual reference); whereas flight routes and/or any type of travel offers availability are all presented visually through country-wide destination points as opposed to traditionally time-consuming city-pairing or airport-pairing individual search process. Applications include customizable modules for Personalize Travel Planner with Intelligent Data Mining Algorithm to recommend products/services based on user's provided profile preferences span across any travel & tourism sectors, web marketing strategies and distribution model.

Travel 2.0 | Strategy + Business' Mashlabs.Travel mashery roadmap includes meshing up of complementary value-added services such as third-party XML based Booking Engines, Travel Meta-Search Engines, GDS XML Travel Switch, Flight Status, Weather, Travel Guide, Mapping, Shipping (FedEx, USPS, UPS, DHL, etc.), Carbon Offset, Amazon, Recommendation & Communications, Telephony, Comparison Shopping, PPC Advertising Network, Newsletter Form/Email Services, iTunes, Affiliate Program API's (LinkShare, CJ, etc.), Events, User-Generated-Contents (UGC) via social networking API’s OpenID strategy, and many more... to dynamically package it with travel & tourism products. Thus, Mashlabs.Travel 2.0 Portal Builder platform can truly bridge the GDS legacy and non-GDS based products to dynamically package them together seamlessly, in real-time, and on a global scale. Mashlabs.Travel platform is Travel 2.0 | Strategy + Business vision to build The Long Tail of Travel as defined by Chris Anderson.

Part of Travel 2.0 | Strategy + Business goal is to soon mobilize third-party travel & tourism technology developers and providers to mashup every possible contents complementary to travel and tourism and to develop custom modules and extensions on an Open Source portlets techniques; within Mashlabs.Travel trading ecosystem via Mashlabs.Net’s Developers Zone to truly unleash and harness the power of Travel Open Source / Travel Open API.

Mashlabs.Travel 2.0 Portal Builder has been commercialized since August 2008 with few, but growing client-base in the pipeline through custom development and integration deployment. Initial client's portal is projected to go live on April/May 2009. Stay tuned for more high profile clients implementation in the coming months.

"To 2.0 or not to 2.0 is not the question." The real question is, "how do you compete and sustain to grow a travel business in today’s rapid-changing market place to continually gain visibility?"

The Market Opportunity:

Talk To Us with your enterprise scale travel automation initiatives, to schedule an online presentation or send us an RFP to receive a Travel 2.0 Mashery custom development proposal price-quote.