It’s been more than two years in
the making - and something Travelport
CEO Greg Webb has talked about repeatedly since joining the company in
August 2019 - and today Travelport is officially launching a new platform, Travelport+, as a single environment to replace its three legacy systems, Galileo, Apollo and
Worldspan.
As distribution and
retailing have evolved and improved over the years, Webb says it has become inefficient
and inadequate to retrofit old systems to serve the travel industry’s needs.
“The systems of the past were all
built around the original requirements ... that were created for airlines specifically.
And certainly travel retailing has gone beyond airlines at this point, yet some
of the underlying data structures are really still tied in what was called the PNR
– passenger name record,” Webb says.
“Our goal is to be the best multi-source
content aggregator in the world. Part of doing that is changing the way that we
think about that underlying data structure.”
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A key part of the new platform,
says Webb, is a “trip container” that will house the travel trip record in an open
system enabling more efficient management of the individual components of the
journey. The system includes a broad range of air, car, hotel and rail content,
with simplified connections “regardless of the source, the seller and how it’s
consumed.”
“So we can handle the blossoming retail
structure of travel ... making that simple even though it’s complex on the back
end,” he says.
Travelport+ also has updated airline ticket exchange tools, a microservices API layer and a cloud-based point-of-sale solution.
“Embedded intelligence will enable both travel retailers and
suppliers to continually optimize their offers, as well as their pricing and
merchandising strategies,” according to a Travelport statement.
Webb says the
platform is intended to deliver value to all parts of the industry.
“This is a multi-year investment in us trying to raise
the bar in terms of how we provide more flexibility, more retail capability,
and ... trying to make sure we are driving more value per ticket ... or per hotel
room booked to suppliers. And making sure that consumers are ultimately getting
more value for every dollar that they spend,” he says.
The functions of
Travelport+ are gradually rolling out globally, with more than 80% of the
company’s customers already operating on the 1G designator – the former Galileo
designator that is being used for the new system - and more than 10% of the remaining
clients integrated.
“We are already
more agile than our competitors,” Webb says.
“This just adds
to that. It makes us more responsive, more agile, more flexible.”