Post your non-GDS travel offers in this section. Ideally an offer is geared towards business-to-business audiences. Your offer maybe of products or services that are useful to travel business owners and their constituents to operate an online travel storefront. Your entry can be in the form of an offer, comment, answer and/or question.

Post your luxury to ultra-luxury travel offers in this section. Ideally an offer is geared towards business-to-business audiences. Your offer maybe of products or services that are useful to travel business owners and their constituents to operate an online travel storefront. Your entry can be in the form of an offer, comment, answer and/or question.

In my opinion, no matter how technology automation will evolve and advance, a travel agent value-add proposition will never be diminished to serve the customer better and provide comfort-zone that they’ll always be there if you need assistance in case of emergency. Travel technology automation serves as tools to the travel agents community. With rising operational cost, the key is to streamline those manual processes of sourcing the best airfare rates and packages according to client’s requirements. Through centralized GUI or mobile-based interfaces, from front-end, mid-office to back-office automation. Without providing proper aid or tools to the agent community to automate operational structure, including call center, those cost prohibits the agents community or its host agency to compete in the market place and sustain its existence for the long haul. Travel agent roles are extended to online travel agency for mass-market consumer, not just high-touch customer for luxury travel packages. Major flaw of online travel agency model is providing proper customer support, which is the most expensive aspect of operating an OTA site, but it can be streamlined and lowered its operational cost through the use of adequate travel automation infrastructure.

Here are some few prominent travel organizations that offers credible information and starter to advance online, classroom based training and accreditation:

The Travel Institute

IATA

Cruise Lines International Association, Inc.

Intute: Social Sciences > Travel & Tourism

Doing proper due-diligence will save you a lot of headache and aggravation in selecting a host agency. Research, reading and preparing structured questionnaire to use during your due diligence will provide you a quantitative reporting matrix and intelligent way how to choose a host agency. Selecting premiere name brands host agencies like American Express, Carlson, etc. is a sure bet that you'll be in good hands, but premier host agencies requires strict-entry qualification process. Then there are 2nd-tiered host agencies, which littered with pyramid scheme - not all of them are scammers, but without proper due diligence you will likely fall into one. There are independent consultants that you can hire for few hours to provide you an overview of the industry and the players before settling down on choosing a host agency. The following links will provide you a good starting source to conduct your due diligence:

Selecting a Host Agency Partner - By Melody Fee, OSSN Vice President

What You Should Know About - Home Based Trade

NACTA Host Agencies - Alphabetical Listing

Even though that these host agencies has been exposed of their Card Mill practices, still there are large number of independent and home based travel agents continually falls for their scheme. Why? Lack of proper and intelligent due diligence is the primary culprit - most agents just don't take time to do their own research and reading to formulate an intelligent decision process. The following links are very useful how to spot them and smell their scam practices miles away:

Naples state Sen. Saunders on board of travel business facing lawsuit - from News-Press

Define Card Mill - Home Travel Agency

ASTA White Paper - on Card Mill

The MLM and the CARD MILL VIRUS. Is There a CURE? - by Peter Stilphen MCC

Royal Caribbean Takes Stand Against Faux Travel Agents - by Cruise Critic

ASTA Reiterates Opposition to Abuse of MLM's and Card Mills - Travel Agent Central

If you are a host agency or wanting to be one, you’ll need a travel technology infrastructure beyond GDS blue-screen terminal as tool for your internal (Intranet) and external (Extranet) agent booking tools. If you are an agent wanting to work with a host agency, then you should ask if they have such tool or probably tools – most uses disparate or varying choices of un-synch technologies. Extranet booking access can be also applied to a supplier, to allow them to upload and manage their inventories – this will be ideal for non-GDS product categories to dynamically package it with GDS based products. Although, this type of aggregated suppliers inventory database can be expensive to deploy and most likely your host agency doesn’t have one unless they are the likes of American Express, Carlson or VAX Vacations – some requires an agent to be accredited or have an IATA and CLIA number to be granted access. But there are also multitudes of extranet access for agents who does not have accredited credential – just Google “host agency” or “consortia” keywords.

I am banking on Roundtrip Systems and Mashlabs.Travel - what's yours? Please share it to the world!

First, if this is a startup site, before you contemplate to decide whether it’s a B2B or B2C model, “ask yourself” if you have a clear plan. “Is your plan clear enough that you’ve spent time writing it on a business plan format with market analysis, marketing plan, sales plan and financial projection?” If not, you better think twice before proceeding. Let’s assume that you have a clear plan in having as business and revenue model for B2B or B2C or both? If you only planned for B2C model, my suggestion is have it both by finding a booking engine with B2B and B2C features. Why? Even if you only planned for B2C distribution model, the B2B feature will come handy as you grow.

Travel 2.0 | Strategy + Business provides Extended Definition & Vision of Travel 2.0, aptly named Travel 2.0 Mashery.

Is there anything out there can be considered as THE best affiliate travel booking engine?--- the answer is clearly nada, zero, zilch! Why? For one thing, because people expect to get it for free, almost all affiliate engines that’s available out there are not flexible, from integration standpoint, look and feel customization, markup/markdown margin capabilities, content uniqueness for search engine marketing, limited to regional booking processing due to credit card fraud, etc. The list just goes on and on in terms of lacking of features and flexibility. And another why?, because the affiliate booking engine providers has spent millions upon millions of dollars building their booking infrastructure based on their business and revenue model, not solely towards affiliates. Now, you are asking, what’s my choice? Well, if you cannot afford to deploy a master-license based booking engine, then you’ll have to settle with free private label affiliate programs out there. But you'll still need to spend money to build a website to integrate the engine, therefore, it is not entirely free. Nothing is free in this world to build a successful business. With years of experience, I have seen very few online entrepreneurs has ever made it big powering their site/s with a free affiliate booking engine. Most online travel entrepreneurs doesn’t realized that operating a travel website or portal requires more than just a booking engine. Adequate funding to enhance, maintain, support and market the site requires varying degree of manpower and skills resources to be successful. I’ve encountered one-too-many travel website operators who complains that the booking engine doesn’t work and I’ve asked what online marketing strategy initiatives they currently have? And most typical answer I’ve got is, “What do you mean? We have a website with your engine in it and no one is visiting the site, therefore no one books it.”- an "if you build, they will come" syndrome, thinking that people will just find their website without promoting it properly. It may sound too simple-minded occurrence, but I shit you not, there are many of those wannabe online travel entrepreneurs out there who just love the whole idea having a travel website and has no idea what it takes to operate it. Then what’s your option? Allocate a budget and hire someone with experience to find you the “right” booking engine based on your planned business and revenue model. Don’t have a clear written plan?--- I suggest that you do not proceed with it until you have one. If you have a plan and budget, then why would you hire anyone to look for the right booking engine instead of doing it yourself on the net? Unless you have experience deploying numerous booking engines and years of experience evaluating differing booking engines out there, then you can spend months or even a year to do your own never-ending research, calling vendors and scheduling demos. That is of course if the vendors feels it’s worth their time talking to you and answering your questions in details, due to the fact that some wannabe online travel entrepreneurs think and treat these vendors as if they are a non-profit organization to expect that the vendor's products and services are being offered for free. There are at least nearly 100 variables that one should find out what a booking can do, features-wise - download a courtesy copy of our Travel Technology Matrix for Booking Engine & XML Connectivity Sourcing Services.

It’s with an assumption that you are planning to obtain a master license fee based leisure booking engine. The question now then is “how much budget are you willing to allocate to obtain this engine?.” A booking engine master license fee can cost between USD 5,000 to USD 500,000 depending on your requirement features. The lower price-point has limited features and flexibility, while higher price-point has more of it – like everything else in life. You may download a courtesy example of booking engine matrix features as your reference data points on what to look for an engine. Also note that most booking engine does not come with a website or portal. It is the responsibility of the licensee to have a manage website to integrate the booking engine with it. Most of the time, a travel website especially a B2C website will cost more than the booking engine itself. Travel website or portal build, design, enhancement, maintenance, support and constant contents update for search engine marketing compliant is the biggest budget expense that any travel site operator should consider to have a successful online travel storefront. There are literally more than a hundred leisure travel booking engine providers in the world, so be prepared to invest enormous amount of time calling them (don't expect that they'll answer all your questions via emails) and schedule series of live demonstrations to evaluate the right booking engine for your requirements. Extensive and proper due diligence (they will also do the same with you via Q&A pre-qualification process - they can easily detect if you are a serious buyer or just on a fishing expedition) is necessary to find the right booking engine for your needs and believe it or not most booking engine out there simply don't work properly for many reasons, but the primary culprit of a flawed booking engine is too buggy at best because it was not properly tested and quality controlled prior to its release in the production environment. You also need to make sure that your booking engine vendor provides timely support and excellent client-services. If you don't spend enough time contacting their references, then you'll end up dealing with typical travel technology vendor who acts like a customer that takes days for them to return calls or answer emails, worse they'll fix a 5 minutes problem in weeks or even months. I won't name names, but there are too many of them in this industry and I personally would not do business with vendors like those - they could potentially ruin your business - that's a first hand experienced as I've paid my dues. The best sites to find contact information of travel technology providers are through SourceIT-Travel or OTID.

Various technology providers offers multitude of features when it comes to corporate booking tools. The likes of GetThere, ResX and Concur dominates the marketplace, until Rearden Commerce has introduced its version of what a corporate booking engine should be via personal assistant browser interface. Rearden Commerce has revolutionized the way corporate travel is being book, with many value-added features, which most corporate booking engines are lacking or may never catch up to. Rearden Commerce is a corporate booking tools on steroid, but it is out of hand with most small businesses due to license fee implementation cost. Rearden Commerce has spent more than 5 years developing their platform with 90 plus in-house developers and USD 50M price tag before it was introduce in the market. And recently Travelport has introduced its new corporate booking tool called Traversa - it looks promising from UI perspective. All these automation advancement in corporate travel, there are still areas that can be unified such as T&E automation still is considered a separate module, which is considered an added expense to corporate users. An innovative startup in South Africa called TravelLinck is unifying the corporate, leisure, group, call center and T&E in partnership with Roundtrip Systems to offer the most powerful and economical corporate booking solutions via Engine.Mashups bundled services. TravelLinck has been in the market for more than a year and now poised to expand its offering globally towards the end of 2008.

The following is an excerpt taken from CompeteBlog:

A number of websites designed to help consumers plan, book, and manage group trips have cropped up in the past couple of years. These include group booking tools such as Groople.com and GroupTravelPlanet.com, planning tools such as HomeAndAbroad.com and TripCart.com, and hybrid sites that combine a variety of features. It has been a rocky battle for these upstarts, many of which have not been able to either market themselves effectively to generate site traffic, or find the right product mix to sustain an active user base. “I’m in!”, a site launched in early 2007, however, is carving out its place in the market and in the past few months has seen its site traffic surge. ImIn.com helps consumers and groups generate new trip ideas and then follows up by providing organization, planning, and networking tools for managing the trip. The mix of content and functionality is striking a chord with consumers and has led to ImIn.com attracting over 170,000 U.S. visitors to its site in December. The figure is a larger total than has ever been observed within the category and is 2X to 3X higher than more established brands like Groople and HotelPlanner.

Opinion:

Literally, there are only very few group-booking-engine in the market today that can be considered off-the-shelf, but customizable. Group travel booking is a growing market, but developing technologies to automate the process proves to be challenging not only from a software development investment standpoint, but also technical challenges. Roundtrip Systems is a Free-Text Email, MS Outlook plugin, SMS and Speech-To-Text based booking engine, which are used as widget-like for corporate, leisure, GROUP, call center booking tools. With Roundtrip Systems built-in Group Bookings capabilities through the use of structured Excel format, any agent or consumer can populate unlimited number of passengers and varying itineraries into one Excel sheet, then upload into Roundtrip Systems group-booking-module and then few minutes travel product categories and associated price-quotes are presented to passengers booking coordinator/agent for single payment processing or it can be send individually to specific passenger for final booking and payment processing. Roundtrip Systems is a very powerful group booking tool, like nothing anyone have seen before. Roundtrip Systems has unified XML/API, which a client licensee can easily build a browser based booking interface.

Most booking engines has call center interface for agents, but most booking engines still lacking it to call it as true centralized call center travel interface with full-blown CRM. Most travel call center still uses disparate booking tools, thus expensive and time consuming to use it through series of manual intervention. Roundtrip Systems has introduced early this year an automated travel call center called TravelDesk. TravelDesk allows corporate user and consumer with sophisticated notification features for self-service travel bookings. TravelDesk also reduces phone call interaction between corporate travel personal assistant or call center agent.

Almost every booking engine providers, including the GDS’s are now coming up with differing value add mobile services on top of their booking tools, but none of them has ever come up yet the way Roundtrip Systems were able to offer in the marketplace today. Roundtrip Systems foundation layer is based on a 20 years old technology infrastructure. Roundtrip Systems took 4 years to developed before it was released early this year and it combines mobile booking and notification in the most innovative sense.

There are travel meta search engines out there that you can use for B2B2C distribution channel via PPC revenue share model such as Kayak affiliate API program, but it does not have flexibility to add your own supplier sites network. On the other hand, there are RAD software applications out there that you can use to build your own meta search to build your own websites suppliers network, but it will cost you, plus months of development time. Or you can partner with third-party hosted B2B meta search engine providers to fully customize it and allows you to build your own websites suppliers network, either PPC advertising redirection fee or affiliate revenue-share model or combine both. Travel 2.0 | Strategy + Business offers meta-search or booking engine and/or XML sourcing consulting services to find you the right vendor for your needs.

Please let me know if you found one. It is very difficult to truly aggregate contents in All-In-One Booking Engine, due to the fact the travel products category are so highly fragmented in terms of segmentation on a very large industry. The closest to be called an all-in-one booking engine maybe through our Travel 2.0 Mashery project under Mashlabs.Travel 2.0 Portal Builder distribution ecosystem.

Since the advent of Internet Distribution Systems or Alternative GDS such as Navitaire and G2 Switchworks, the so called experts has been (and still to these days) trying to predict the demise of GDS Legacy Systems such as Sabre, Amadeus, Galileo, Worldspan, Abacus, etc. These so called experts has been wrong and will be proven wrong over and over again due to the fact that any legacy systems are the lifeblood of any industry. IBM and other super-computing legacy providers has been predicted by experts since the advent of N-tiered architecture to replace legacy systems and up to now, these so called experts couldn’t be more wrong. Legacy systems are effective underneath any N-tiered architecture for streamlined processing and that can be applied similarly to Internet Distribution Systems running side-by-side with GDS legacy Systems – all OTA sites does it because no OTA in the world can afford to build an IDS to replace the traditional GDS to query and source large numbers of travel inventories and contents. It should not be treated them as competitor due to the fact that no single entity in the travel and tourism can monopolize the industry, nobody! Thinking about competition in this USD 11 trillion a year market will be considered a waste of time - do what you do best and don't think about competition at all by finding your niche.

Depending on your products or contents category requirements, there are many (but requires industry knowledge and years of networking to find them) non-GDS based XML connectivity, which anyone can use to build their own fully customize booking engine interfaces and business logic or processes. Some of these non-GDS XML connectivity providers may offer one product category feed such as hotels or accommodation or maybe two or three product categories. Rarely does any provider offers more than three products category data feeds in one unified XML/API. Obtaining non-GDS XML/API connectivity access can be free or if it requires licensing and setup fee, it would start between USD 5,000 to USD 50,000 – the higher its price-points, the larger the contents availability in it. Licensing fees can be negotiated to lower the price or obtain it at no cost if you can establish large monthly cumulative booking volume milestones projection. Also note that you will need some kind of credibility and successful track records in the online travel distribution for a provider to lower or waive their data-access licensing fee. Also note that it can cost you between USD 5,000 to USD 25,000 to integrate and develop booking interfaces using XML/API data feed, so be prepare to either outsource it or hire an experienced team of developers. Mashlabs.Travel 2.0 Portal Builder is slated to release its own non-GDS Open XML/API Travel Switch to the public sometimes next year, which anyone who can be granted an access to can query and source wholesale rates ranging from airfares, cars, hotels, accommodations, vacations, experiential tours, holiday packages, activities, rails, transfers, entertainment and dining, real-time private yachts charter and private jets charter as well as other Travel 2.0 Mashable value add services and contents. Through Travel 2.0 | Strategy +Business, we can provide sourcing consulting services to find you the best-fit non-GDS XML/API connectivity from various vendors.