Understanding how booking tools work can mean the end to one of travel technology's greatest mysteries, and make life a little less complex as Bob Papworth finds out
Gary Hance, chief operations officer at ATP - The Advanced Travel Partner - is one of the most technologically-literate individuals in the business. He fiddles in the back of computers and invents things. He can fix stuff without having to turn it off and turn it on again. He sits on the Guild of Travel Management Companies' technology working party, and delivers learned speeches to anorak audiences worldwide. He also thinks he's a booking tool, and might even be a booking engine ...
Now, just before Hance's boss, ATP chief executive Graham Ramsey, gets worried, it should be pointed out that when Hance made this curious claim, he did so for purely illustrative purposes.
He was trying to explain "booking engines", starting from the premise that the "engine" is the big piece of kit that stores all the knowledge and does all the work, while the "tool" is a smaller piece of kit - usually software - that gives mere mortals access to the engine and all its wondrous works.
Thus, to the end-user, any travel consultant is a booking tool and the really brainy travel person (Hance, for example) is a booking engine.
So how did we get here? In 1976, a couple of bright sparks launched something called Travicom, billed as the world's first "multi-access reservations system" (Sabre, dreamed up as far back as 1953, spent most of its formative years as American Airlines' in-house reservations system). It was a near-instant hit, and even though it gave agents access to fewer than 50 airlines, it ended up handling something like 80 per cent of all UK travel trade air bookings.
Then, in 1987 in Amsterdam, a little outfit called Galileo, part-owned by Travicom's owner British Airways, was introduced to an unsuspecting world. A year later, Travicom was reduced to the role of UK sales agent for the flashy new upstart.
There then followed a period of fast-and-furious in-fighting which saw the arrival and departure of the likes of Abacus and Apollo, and Covia and SystemOne, and the industry eventually ended up with four computer reservations systems - now re-branded as global distribution systems, or GDSs.
The simple, uncomplicated days of computerised booking, it seems, are over. Take, for example, the news that members of the Global Hotel Alliance (GHA) are this year "feeling the benefit" of 40,000 more room-nights - more, that is, than in 2007 - booked via gha.net.
GHA is a group of 10 independent hotel brands, including Kempinski, Pan Pacific and JurysDoyle, and gha.net ("powered by Micros' ORS and MyFidelio products") is a booking engine.
By Amadeus, Galileo, Sabre and Worldspan standards, it is more like an outboard motor. It does nothing but book hotel rooms, and then only GHA members' hotel rooms. It produces all sorts of management information and - apparently - enhances GHA's "ability to drive cross-brand revenues". It doesn't do planes, trains or automobiles, but it clearly works for GHA members, who are seeing distribution costs cut by anything up to US$25 per booking.
It is also a typical product of just one of the seemingly-innumerable trends manifesting themselves within the travel technology sector - while the big boys become even bigger, a whole raft of comparatively tiny, and very highly-specialised, products are emerging.
None of which would present too many challenges to the technologically-disadvantaged, were it not for the fact that the major players are increasingly tailoring their offerings to meet specific client needs, often by piggy-backing the smaller players' products.
Thus, you may think you're booking your rail travel through your GDS, but, in fact, you're booking through thetrainline or Evolvi, which in many cases have become booking engines within booking engines.
To complicate that even further, outfits like thetrainline are looking to supplement their core content with other, complementary stuff, and the easiest way to do that is to tap into yet another extant booking engine.
In the GDS world, content is king, and it often makes more sense to tap into somebody else's content than to create your own.
Martin Cowley, senior vice-president EMEA for Sabre Travel Network, agrees that the battleground of "full content" is now shifting to that of "relevant content".
"Clearly content is fundamental," he says, "and our position with the people who subscribe to us is that we will provide them with as full content as possible, but you do swing between full content and relevant content.
"It's a moving feast, and our job is to meet the needs of clients. We do that well, as do all the GDSs, but increasingly we touch our partners' businesses in different ways. Sometimes we touch our clients' back-end systems, sometimes we work with third-party systems - what I think is really interesting about the competitive landscape is that we have all managed to identify that there isn't one size that fits."
In short, the table d'hôte menu no longer suffices; clients - and in this context, that means travel management companies - not only want to pick and choose from an à la carte menu, they also want to be able to order off-menu as well.
Amadeus spokesman Rob Golledge insists that GDSs see that as an opportunity rather than a threat. "We don't ever pretend that we are going to be everything to everyone, so we will work with the best providers - we integrate with people like Evolvi.
"At Amadeus, we are working really hard on that, and have integrated destination content, airport lounge bookings, and so on. We see that as part of the value proposition, because [TMCs] need to be looking at the door-to-door solution.
"We think it is still a very compelling offer that GDSs have, because they allow agents to compare. We did have a period where content was lacking, but that is no longer the case because providers recognise they get better yields selling through TMCs."
Travel management companies, he says, are convinced customers. "We have got the choice, we have got the work-flow benefits. We have got good reliability and quick response times, and you don't get that from the web. The other 'plus' is flexibility - if you book online, you have to pay then and there," concludes Golledge.
Patrick Lukan, UK and Ireland general manager for Travelport - which now owns both Galileo and the more leisure-orientated Worldspan - throws yet another spanner into the already-complicated works.
Boundaries are becoming so blurred as to become unrecognisable, Lukan suggests, and even the distinction between a booking tool and a booking engine is becoming increasingly soft-focus. Most booking tools are multi-GDS, so a booking made through GetThere, owned by Sabre, might well be 'back-ended' by Galileo.
Corporate booking tools effectively bypass the TMC, but ultimately take the booker to the same destination. And they have their limitations.
"I see a booking tool as a way of allowing the corporate to do a certain amount of the TMC's work in exchange for, typically, a reduction in the service fee.
"That can be a win-win situation, but corporate booking tools, in my opinion, do not and will not replace a seasoned travel consultant at a travel management company. They are not designed to do that. They do serve a very good purpose on more simple transactions, and they have a place in that space, but it is not something you get into with a view to capturing 100 per cent of a client's travel."
And so one arrives at a situation where the original booking engines, the GDSs, not only incorporate many other 'mini' booking engines and are on the look-out for more (Travelport, for one, is looking into theatre ticket and restaurant reservation providers), they are also so closely allied to corporate booking tools as to be almost indistinguishable from them.
Equally, those specialist booking engines are diversifying. Speaking at HRG's recent technology seminar at the Microsoft Campus in Reading, thetrainline's head of distribution, Ian Cairns, explained that his company's Web Service Gateway (WSG) is used not only by the likes of KDS and GetThere, but is also integrated into TMC-built systems with people such as Hillgate and Click Travel, and is also part of the Hotelscene offering.
Paul Saggar, director of technology product development at HRG, believes it has all gone a bit too far, too quickly. Indeed, he argues that companies like his - and Hillgate, Click, ATP et al - are actually devising their own systems precisely because the shortcomings of the established players have led corporates to believe they can do better.
"The big issue we have is that there is a perceived cost saving - clients think it is cheaper to get their own people to do it [book travel] rather than picking up the phone to us. The trouble is that a booking engine is just that - it lets you book. It doesn't do anything else."
Having made a "cheaper" booking, the client then discovers that he or she has made a mistake, or wants to change or even cancel - and that's when they pick up the phone to the TMC. All too often, the client company ends up paying for the original booking and then paying again for the subsequent re-booking - better to let the travel management company do the job properly in the first place.
Saggar's comments illustrate perfectly the fact that 'booking engine' and 'booking tool' have become almost synonymous. However, he also believes that true booking engines - effectively, the GDSs - have added content without enhancing the accompanying services and processes; the engine may have more content than it used to, but it's still the same old engine. For that reason, HRG and others are actively developing their own systems, cherry-picking the content their clients need and ignoring the rest.
"I think people will start looking at the core services, like air, hotel, car and rail, and finishing the job," Saggar says. There is a huge development cost involved, and it cannot all be palmed off on partner providers. "We are swallowing a whole lot, but ultimately we don't want to sell them [our clients] the wrong thing. We [travel management companies] are here to make sure that the whole process is made more efficient along the entire supply chain," he adds.
So there you have it. A GDS is a booking engine and the internet isn't, although an individual website could be, albeit a highly-specialised one; and there are other specialised ones, like thetrainline, Conferma or Evolvi, and they often work together so that a booker can move from one booking engine to another without realising it (or maybe they do); and the big booking engines are incorporating some or all of the smaller ones, while the travel management companies are building their own booking engines; and the whole lot are often confused with, or indeed come with, booking tools which used to be something completely different but are less different now; and some, any or all of them don't necessarily work as well as they might.
I'd ask Gary Hance for an explanation, but the fax machine isn't working.
Unless that's the toaster...