T.S+B Internal News

7.31.2008
Travel 2.0 | Strategy + Business has launched its proprietary Travel 2.0 Portal Builder under Mashlabs.Travel (a separate site will be up soon) product and service brand. The idea is to provide travel and tourism providers the ability to deploy an enterprise portal quality online travel and tourism storefront with plug and play third-party portfolio of booking engines selection for seamless integration, professional designed, and economical deployment. In addition, Mashlabs.Travel provides customizable portlets within a portlet’ ready-made templates and wizard-template-builder. Travel 2.0 Portal Builder's CMS/CRM/ERP eCommerce modules and components include wide array of customizable social networking web application mashups, mobile services, travel and tourism inventory database management systems to upload and manage non-GDS negotiated rates for dynamic packaging cross-selling and up-selling, thus Mashlabs.Travel becoming an ecosystem for travel and tourism products and services. On top of it, Mashlabs.Travel leverages a mature and stable open source Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) for push and pull XML web services capabilities. Mashlabs.Travel web services roadmap includes GDS Travel XML Switch offering. Mashlabs.Travel plans to aggregate all third-party XML’s to build its own proprietary unified Travel & Tourism XML Switch, which will pave the way to build its own drag and drop Interactive Visual Mapping Booking Engine and making Mashlabs.Travel an Open Travel API Trading Marketplace (tripXML) for selling and buying travel products and services. Mashlabs.Travel is currently accepting and developing custom portal development for its client base using the Travel 2.0 Portal Builder framework and eventually will offer a self-service or do-it-yourself portal building via Software as a Service (SaaS) subscription model to end users and Reseller Partner Programs for developers and designers.

4.18.2008
Travel 2.0 | Strategy + Business announces "Earn-Back Program" for its private label dynamic travel booking engine setup fee; to recover their setup fee to integrate/customize, project manage and training support to deploy the booking engine. The earn-back program credits an affiliate's partner/supplier with a $1 per booking until their entire setup fee is fully recovered - it is a reciprocal commitment for both party to perform, "our experience has been fully documented that by giving away the booking for free, most of the time the affiliates will not perform or will take for granted not to use the engine because they do not have enough investment to begin with or they have under estimated that having an online store front requires more than just having a website, which requires considerable financial resources on their part to promote their site. The earn-back program is our way to select only serious inquiries, that if any potential affiliate or partner/supplier does not reciprocally invest to upfront the setup fee, then they will not likely to perform to generate bookings or they are not serious nor have adequate financial resources to having a successful travel e-commerce storefront.