The Genesis Travel Distribution System, a trade-owned GDS, shut down this month. Bruce Bishins, president and CEO, discussed the news with Nadine Godwin, Travel Weekly editor at large.
Q: Who had the idea to start the Genesis GDS?
A: It was an outgrowth of a presentation I made to the Riverside Travel Group in Oregon in 1995. The members were concerned about pay cuts, which had just started, and concerned about getting caught in the middle of a dispute between airlines and GDSs. They thought it would be better if agents had their own platform, and that if agents could cut the fat out of that system, it would soothe the agent-airline relationship.
This was followed by a meeting in Chicago with ARTA, ASTA and business travel groups, and from that emerged the idea for an agent-owned system.
Q: You launched a res system with Worldspan and used a unique tool, FareSpider, for comparing GDS and website rates and booking both. Genesis was the host for its subscribers, too. But what happened?
A: Our customer base was mostly small and medium-sized agencies, mostly selling leisure. The need for GDS content is not what it used to be. So much is on the Web, and GDSs often don't have competitive fares.
At the 2004 launch, the majority of bookings came through the GDS, but by the first quarter of this year, 75% were Web bookings. We found agents very comfortable settling outside the [old] systems. And our customers reported finding inventory open on the Web when it was closed on the GDS.
Q: Why different inventories?
A: We discovered GDS caching. Because of online travel agencies and others making frequent queries to carrier mainframes, the airlines forced the GDSs to cache data and work with that for a period of time. The carriers refresh the data, such as every 45 minutes or hour, so agent queries weren't to live data, and agents were saying they couldn't rely on the GDS but they could rely on the websites.
Q: Did you have to shut down because too few agencies participated?
A: Poor participation was never the issue. The issue was that our structure was built around a hosting and settlement service, and it became unnecessary. The key factor was the number of hosted transactions, [which fell] as they moved to the Web.
Also, in the last couple of years, we came to the nasty position where agents were caught in the middle while airlines pushed their GDS costs down.
And there were the debit memos because fares in the GDS were not correct. The exposure to debit memos was a big concern to us.
Q: FareSpider is the only piece still standing. It links to airline sites, airlines' agent portals, Travelocity, Expedia, aggregators. What happens to that?
A: TravelSoft is the vendor now, and so far it continues its operation for Genesis customers. I hope FareSpider has a huge future.
Q: It took nine years to launch the Genesis GDS and four to shut it down. Was the project a flop?
A: No, it was hardly a flop. It did raise the level of discourse as it applies to distribution matters. If it hadn't been for the demise of Swissair and its Atraxis IT division [in 2001], there would have been the platform we planned for. But a lot of technology came into existence on the coattails of this, certainly FareSpider. ... It was built [by TravelSoft] to our specs. A couple of consortia were eager to take it on. I've heard from them already.