Following their scripts, agents mull 'going GUI'

Walk into any travel agency in North America today and you will see agents at computers, typing in text commands that in this age of point-and-click desktops seem as archaic as base airline commissions.

As they search for flights or hotel availability or compare prices, their queries employ a syntax so arcane that the commands could pass for some foreign tongue to the uninitiated. Yet, their fingers tap away faster than your kids can pound out instant messages or update their MySpace pages.

Seemingly within nanoseconds, the agents have coaxed their green-screen displays to spit out, line-by-line, lists of available flights or hotels and their prices.

But dramatic change could be coming to the world of these "green-screeners."

If individual productivity were the only issue, there would be no problem with these old, command-driven interfaces. But at a time when airlines are rushing to innovate their fare structures and unbundle anything other than basic conveyance (checked bags, pillows, meals, etc.), green screens are speed bumps in the paths of the airlines' a la carte dreams and the GDSs that are struggling to accommodate both ends of the distribution channel.

The term "green screen" is a holdover from the days when computer monitors, whether part of a dedicated dumb terminal or a PC, invariably sported black screens with green text.

Today's monitors produce backgrounds and texts in a rainbow of colors, but the green-screeners still enter their text commands the same way they did in the days when their only interface was a blinking cursor.

All browser-based platforms give agents a choice of accomplishing some tasks in the command-driven section of their desktops while performing other functions in the graphical user interface, or GUI (pronounced GOO-ee), environment, of the Mac and Windows operating systems.

It's old, but it works

Yet thousands of agents in North America and around the world still shop and book inventory on green screens, shunning the GUI options that GDS vendors offer on dual-platform systems. In many cases, they consider graphical interfaces inefficient razzmatazz.

Why get bogged down with panoramic photos when the green screen lists the amenities and rates of a dozen hotels in one line of text per property?

For example, an agent who skims a single line about the Crowne Plaza Beverly Hills instantly sees that the amenities include I P F D -- high-speed Internet access, pool, fitness center and dining -- and that the rate is $199.

This is the way generations of travel agents have been doing it. Their bread-and-butter query terms, often saved, treasured and traded, vary widely from one res system to another.

But in all cases, they are fast and efficient, and the agents' own customized scripts -- series of formats that they string together and save -- can be robust.

Unfortunately, green-screen computing is severely limited on the agency and supplier side of things, which is why it has been giving way for years to GUI desktops such as the Amadeus Selling Platform, Worldspan Go, MySabre and, scheduled for introduction this week, Galileo Desktop 2.0.

Widespread failure to move agents from command-line systems to GUI platforms could have major consequences as airlines, hotels and car rental companies increasingly seek to merchandise their inventory in new ways: unbundling products, branding fares and up-selling rooms, flights and car types.

For example, Air Canada led the way in North America in this regard with fare add-ons for lounge access, prepaid meal vouchers and advance seat selection as well as discounts for one-way flights, flying without luggage or opting to forego mileage rewards. (For more on airline merchandising, see related story on page 2, "Amadeus working on a solution that suits Air Canada.")

All agree that green screens are yesterday's technology and can't adequately handle the new supplier agenda, which is why in the last decade the GDSs have been introducing Web-enabled desktops, but with built-in green-screen windows.

GDSs produce hybrid solutions

The challenge for the GDSs is figuring how to deliver new functionality when many agents are reluctant to leave the green-screen format. For example, GDS developers today write programs in the GUI environment for things like flexible pricing features and secondary airports, then must reconfigure the display and features for agents who still demand a command environment.

The fact that today's green screen lives within one or more windows in a modern GUI environment is helping to encourage the transition.

Straddling both environments, many agents enter commands in one window, then click, tab or toggle over to a GUI display, where they fill in boxes with dates or carrier and airport preferences, just as a consumer might do on Expedia or Southwest.com. They can then view hotel photos, access an interactive map of the destination or retrieve the layout of a cruise ship's deck.

Such blended, or hybrid, desktops are taking hold, but the preponderance of search, booking and reservations-management tasks performed on agent desktops most likely originate in, or track back to, archaic, green-screen environments.

As Amadeus, Worldspan, Sabre and Galileo focus on the desktop development, they are trying to balance the demands of airlines and other suppliers that want to market their inventory in slicker ways with the decades-old habits of travel agents who feel they perform their work just fine with formats and customized scripts.

Thus, the travel agency desktop continues to evolve in fits and starts, as it has for over a quarter of a century, sometimes because new platforms get ahead of the market.

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