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On Monday evening I returned from a week in Europe visiting two clients. These meetings reinforced my belief that all segments of the travel industry are evolving to be more global in nature. Despite this fact, the trip reinforced the need for travel software vendors to understand and adapt to regional and country specific requirements. It is my belief that […]

A clear battleground is emerging around the airline’s efforts to capture high yield traffic through low cost distribution. First I need to clearly define what I and the industry mean by the term “high yield traffic”. In a simple sense, high yield refers to the travel segment that is willing to pay a higher fare for a perceived value. This […]

For years a standard travel e-commerce approach to online booking involved licensing a “booking engine” for the Website. These booking engines began as a front-end to the GDS allowing the consumer to book air, car and hotel online. As travel e-commerce became more complex, booking engines often added business logic and customer profile information. An alternative trend to enable Website […]

When I launched my consulting practice in 1995, many of my early clients (Carlson Leisure Group, Broadvision) focused on using personalization techniques for travel planning and booking. It is surprising that now in 2006, we’ve still seen few efforts by the major travel players to filter queries and deliver more personalized information for their customers. There are some obvious concerns […]

I wanted to further clarify my beliefs regarding the changing travel distribution environment. First let me make one point clear, I do not believe the GDS will “replaced” by the so called GNEs. A more realistic scenario is that both GDS and GNEs will exist as low cost distribution channels. The debate should not be framed around GDS verses GNEs. […]

It was nice to be quoted in a today’s Reuters’ article. Unfortunately , the reporter became confused between the definition and concept of a GDS and that of an online travel agent. Though there is a connection between online travel and the GDS, (Travelocity and Orbitz are owned by two of the GDS, in the case of Cendant they own […]