MOORESTOWN, N.J. -- Amadeus appointed Atlas Travel Technologies
here to connect tour operators in North America to a new
tour-booking system that the CRS vendor plans to introduce to
agents in the latter part of 1999.
Atlas was named by Amadeus as the preferred hosting system for
North American tour operators who want not only to connect to
Amadeus Tours, as the booking product is called but also to
outsource distribution and inventory management. When a tour
operator uses Atlas for tour hosting, it gets connectivity to the
major CRSs and to the Internet, according to Colin Knell, Atlas
vice president of sales and operations.
Atlas also offers a switching system that provides tour
operators with a single connection between their own internal
systems and multiple CRSs and the Internet, he said. Atlas is a
wholly owned subsidiary of a joint venture between Amadeus;
Telstra, the Australian national telecommunications company,
and
Jetset, an Australian tour company.
Amadeus declined to elaborate on its new tour-booking
product.
Currently, Amadeus agents who want to book tours electronically
exit Amadeus and connect to TourSource, a Worldspan product.
TourSource works fine, said Alan Gerstner of the Cruise Corner and
Vacation Center in Wilmette, Ill. "But you have to remember where
you are. The commands for TourSource are different from the
commands for Amadeus."
Gerstner said solutions like Atlas' that can make it easier and
cheaper for tour operators to sell products electronically are "a
good idea" from agents' standpoint. "The smaller tour operator that
can't afford to develop a multimillion-dollar reservations system
now has a way to get the product to market," Gerstner said.
Tour bookings made through the CRS help agencies reach segment
thresholds with the CRS vendors, and they boost revenues because a
number of operators pay higher commissions on electronic
bookings.
Gerstner said his agents are on commission-sharing pay
arrangements, and they lose a percentage point of their commission
share if they don't book a tour through the CRS when that option is
available.
Knell predicted an increase in the number of tour operators that
opt for outside tour hosting because it offers a cost-effective way
to handle large volumes of electronic transactions that some older
systems can't. "There are many tour operators today that have a
need to get a much more robust, up-to-date system with distribution
capabilities through the CRSs and the Internet," he said.