Long before the Internet changed the landscape of the travel industry, the Global Distribution System (GDS) was created by the airline industry. The airlines created the first GDS in the 1960’s as a way to track flight schedules, availability, pricing and offer inventory to travel agencies. In the 1970’s, SABRE (owned by American Airlines) and Apollo (owned by United) installed their GDS technology in travel agencies. Galileo and Amadeus joined the ranks a few years later. This technology helped travel agents automatically generate their own airline reservations for their clients and saved an incredible amount of time. These GDS’s also gave the major airlines significantly increased sales exposure.
Today, TravelPlex employs both Sabre and Worldspan Global Distribution Systems. This is the only way we can, in conjunction with the web scraping tool BookingBuilder, guarantee our travelers are receiving the best price and inventory availability for two of St. Louis’s dominant carriers, American Airlines and Southwest Airlines. These two specific GDS’s are integral if you are a traveler located or traveling in the mid-west.
The value of today’s GDS’s is two-fold; it helps the consumer get the best price quickly and efficiently and allows the travel advisor to be more precise and efficient. The main benefit of both the Worldspan and Sabre GDS’s is that it provides a perfect virtual marketplace for vendors such as hotels, airlines, and car rental companies to display their products to a global Internet travel audience. The GDS is a natural outlet for airlines, hotels, resorts, and even smaller boutique hoteliers that want to increase revenue and online marketing exposure. With more and more consumers turning toward the professional service of a travel advisor, GDS’s offer the traveling public dynamic packaging and pricing. Research shows that consumers booking through a travel advisor and GDS find lower prices than those who book on the Internet. Repeated studies from numerous companies ranging from JD Powers & Associates, TOPAZ, and IBM, show travel companies returning the lowest fares over 98% of the time. This would not be possible without the use of the GDS.
Mitigate the risks that come with an increasingly global workforce
TravelPlex will enable our clients to mitigate the risks that come with an increasingly global workforce. By tracking the movements of travelers worldwide, we will support your security management efforts to help travelers avoid risks before they occur and deal with risky situations that impact your travelers.
Our travel technology solution provides accurate, actionable virtually real-time pre-travel information that not only helps you manage travel operations but also enables you to implement effective travel security programs. When your travelers book a trip, our system captures the reservation from the GDS. It then confirms the accuracy of the information and stores it in a secure, internal database for access by travel managers or other authorized client personnel.
Generate standard and custom reports that are reliable and secure
TravelPlex can generate reports of traveler locations, flights and reservations. Since we extract the traveler’s data from the GDS and keep it in our own secure data centers, pre-travel reports remain independent of any GDS accessibility issues. You can rely on this information – when you need it, you will have it.
We can use this Web-based application to run standard or customized travel reports. We can report on the entire reservation or any subset of data based on flexible report prompting. Pre-travel reports include:
- Airline reservation detail and summary
- Car reservation detail and summary
- Hotel reservation city and property
- Passengers on the same flight or on a particular flight
- Arrival and departure information
- At-a-glance “hot spot” reports
- Emergency contact and passport information
- Traveler map location in both detail and summary forms
