Progress Software has unveiled its latest Progress Responsive Travel Alliances solution accelerator at the Brussels’ Air Transport IT Summit.
The solution accelerator, which significantly improves marketing, alliance and code sharing capabilities, would help travel firms to provide more travel destination options, a wider selection of products and services from multiple partners and enhanced premium traveler recognition to their customers. It would also permit airline customer service representatives to use the multiple central reservation systems that are bound together and presented as one system and see and act on all shared passengers at every touch point.
The solution reduces the time taken to bring new services and products into the market and thus delivers incremental and new revenue quickly. It could be adapted easily to current legacy IT systems and can also be integrated into proprietary businesses.
Joshua Norrid, Vice President for Travel and Leisure at Progress Software, stated that volatile fuel pricing, increasing maintenance and labor costs along with other expenses are constantly putting pressure on the travel industry. Revenue partnerships, code-shares and alliances are proving to be attractive growth strategies for the airlines. But this would mean involving elongated timelines, high development costs along with risky and complex projects. The reason for this could be because of the necessity of interconnecting the sea of systems along with the different standards practiced by partnering carriers and the innate complex nature of reliable data exchange.
To manage the complex partnering, the Progress Responsive Travel Alliances Solution Accelerator could be combined with the Progress DataXtend Semantic Integrator product. The industry can now ensure that a Passenger Name Record, which can be accessed universally, and the associated SOA web services are now possible.
Norrid further revealed that this accelerator would provide noticeably simplified integration between central reservation systems, while meaningful exchange of information between services and applications could be enabled by the Progress DataXtend Semantic Integrator product, inside a messaging and service-oriented architecture (SOA). With this, the airlines could easily and speedily create standard based web services that would help the multi carrier management of a complete passenger itinerary.
Source: http://www.progress.com