A funny thing happened to Viator,
the destination activities distributor, on the way to attracting
bookings from travel agents: It abandoned the GDSs and partnered
with ARC.
Why?
To borrow a phrase
from the 1992 campaign of Hillary's husband, "It's the technology,
stupid."
Today, many of the
4,500 destination activities available via Viator from local
operators in 75 countries are unavailable in the res
systems.
Until about four
years ago, Viator had been distributing these products through
Sabre, Galileo and Worldspan. But Viator, which originated in
Australia and has an office in San Francisco, abandoned that
strategy and had exited the three GDSs by 2003.
The problem then was
that travel agents weren't booking the commissionable full-day
tours to Naples and Pompeii, the Buenos Aires balloon flights and
the Bahamas snorkeling adventures in any great numbers.
The 10% commissions
were there for the taking, but agents weren't bungee jumping after
Viator bookings through their res systems.
It wasn't for lack of
trying on the part of Viator. The company fielded about a dozen
employees who were dedicated to supporting the U.S. agency channel,
but it eliminated those positions in 2002.
At industry
conferences and in other public statements, Viator officials vented
their frustrations about dealing with the lethargy of the GDSs.
Viator executives said they wouldn't be able to entice agencies to
book Viator's tour partners until the GDSs got serious about
building browser-based interfaces that would make it easier for
agents to navigate and use.
Air Canada, of
course, last year offered similar criticism of the GDSs' technology
acumen, arguing that the res systems weren't facile enough to
display and unbundle the airline's inventory in the same manner
that Air Canada could display them on its own Web sites.
So, as reported in
Nadine Godwin's scoop in Travel Weekly on March 12, Viator has
teamed with ARC to launch ARC MarketPlace at www.arcmarketplace.com.
So here you have ARC,
which runs the airline settlement system and is still controlled by
the airlines, venturing into selling nonair products in a travel
agent-friendly forum that bypasses the GDSs.
As the saying goes,
you can't make this stuff up.
ARC plans to promote
the Marketplace at trade shows and through its routine broadcast
messages to travel agents.
Payment of the 6%
commissions from Viator will be integrated into IAR, the electronic
reporting system, in the next few months, said Allan Muten, a
spokesman for ARC, and agents routinely will be issued credits and
won't have to hunt down tardy payers.
ARC, he said, also
plans to provide links to the ARC Marketplace from all of the
organization's programs so agencies conducting their normal
financial oversight, for example, can easily navigate to the
marketplace to book a destination activity.
Travel agents, of
course, won't get rich off 6% commissions from Viator, but booking
theater tickets and grabbing some seats on the London Eye may show
clients the value of using agency services.
Viator CEO Rod
Cuthbert is cautiously upbeat about the new partnership, and the
prospect of increased bookings from travel agencies.
"ARC is very
committed to the initiative, and given our understandable
skepticism, we find it hard not to imagine that they will have
greater success than the GDS efforts of the past," Cuthbert said.
"Times have changed, agents understand the Web more and even those
consumers who don't want to do these bookings themselves know the
agents can do it for them if they [agents] are willing to make the
effort."
Both Muten and
Cuthbert note that the technical advances of the last few years
should propel the new partnership.
Muten recalled that
TravelBuyARC, an existing effort to facilitate nonair bookings that
the ARC Marketplace will supplant, doesn't have a robust settlement
system and "was not terribly user-friendly."
And Cuthbert chimed
in that ARC MarketPlace "has the benefits of a better user
interface" that you'd expect four or five years after the GDS
experiment failed.
Time, Viator and ARC
march on.