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Travelport Plans ‘Major Refresh’ of Worldspan Go! by Dec.

by Michèle McDonald  November 05, 2012

Travelport will release “a major refresh” of Worldspan Go! in December, according to chief executive officer Gordon Wilson. Worldspan Go! is Travelport’s browser-based desktop technology.

The GDS provider is “on course” to issue a new version next month, with a broad rollout in the early part of the new year, Wilson told Travel Market Report.

Upgraded points of sale
The changes will address the fact that Worldspan has been “lagging a bit” in Travelport’s mission to get all its subscribers onto upgraded points of sale, Wilson said.

Fully 70% of Travelport’s subscribers will be on upgraded points of sale by the end of this year, he said.

Some will be using the Universal Desktop and others the Smartpoint API.

Many Canadian agents will have adopted Agencia, the desktop designed to accommodate Air Canada’s fare families and “attribute selling.”

Slower than expected
Adoption of the Universal Desktop has been “a bit slower” than Travelport had anticipated, Wilson said.

That’s due in part to a “chicken-and-egg” situation: One of the Universal Desktop’s major benefits is the ease of booking airline’s ancillary products and services, but airlines have been slow to make them available through the GDSs. “But the momentum is growing there,” Wilson said.

More uptake on leisure side
Adoption has been high enough, however, to identify some trends. “We see a lot in the Asia-Pacific region,” Wilson said. “And, oddly enough, there has been more uptake in the leisure market at this juncture. We see more uptake of Smartpoint in the corporate market.”

That may be due to the Universal Desktop’s software developer kit that allows agencies to integrate their own content into the workflow, which leisure agencies like to do, he said.

Corporate agencies, by contrast, tend to rely more on GDS-only content, and Smartpoint is “an efficiency tool that seems to resonate more” with TMCs, he said.
 
Adding default settings
In addition, the Universal Desktop’s “hugely configurable” features may have been too much of a good thing for some agencies. So Travelport is now offering a “more shrink-wrapped” version that has default settings, so that customers can use it more quickly, Wilson said.

He compared the change to the factory settings for consumer electronic devices: Customers can hit the ground running and use them immediately, then customize them over time.
 
Earnings Down in Q3
Travelport last week reported a net loss in the third quarter of $39 million, on revenues of $489 million.

That’s compared to a loss of $23 million in third quarter 2011, on revenues of $509 million.

The decline was due largely to the migration of United Airlines off Travelport’s Apollo platform and was in line with company expectations.

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