Posted by Pankaj Gupta

What is CBT

Corporate booking tool aka known as CBT is mainly created to facilitate a hasslefree business relationship between the travel house and its corporate clients. The corporate profile data can be efficiently created, based on divisions such as departments, designations, user roles, and accordingly internal travel guidelines and booking workflow can be managed. The system is able to provide various reports for corporate and supplier reconciliation.

There are numerous options out there in the digital ether, so it’s obvious to get lost searching for the right fit.

What are the CBTs available in the Market?

1. Amadeus cytric Travel & Expense

Bridging travel booking with expense management Amadeus cytric Travel & Expense (AcTE) is Amadeus’s new online booking tool, launched in early 2016, working on Microsoft outlook plugin integration.

2. Concur

Efficient and generating transparent expense reports Concur is an online expense-based management service that consolidates and organizes travel-related expenses, also provides SAP integration which will reduce overhead for customers for consuming services from SAP.

3. Egencia 

Egencia is a mobile-based travel management system that is run by the customer data and funding from its parent company, Expedia. At backend it uses SOAP-based XML services for Booking.

4. GetThere 

GetThere, another product from  Sabre Travel Network, is an online travel management system configured mainly to help companies and deal with multiple vendor agreements and complicated travel policies.

5. Lola

An on-demand mobile-based platform that connects travelers directly to a team of travel managers, Lola helps both business and leisure travelers to find things like hotels, flights, and everything in between.

6. HelloGbye

HelloGbye is an online platform that uses artificial intelligence to have a travel bot along your side all throughout the booking process. You just have to create a profile, set your city of origin, and you’re all set.

7. TripCase

Like GetThere, Sabre has launched one more tool ‘TripCase’. The moment a trip is booked, the flight, car and hotel reservation information is automatically added to a traveler’s TripCase account. The traveler does not have to do anything, other than login to its registered TripCase account, to see its latest trip information. Any additional plans can easily be added by forwarding confirmation emails to trips@tripcase.com or manual addition to account. After TripCase account creation accessing key travel documents and information is very easy. 

8. Carla

CARLA is one more CBT (travel bot) available, which offers advice for planning your business trip. You can fire travel policy questions to it, such as if you’re allowed to fly in business class, and it will let you know right away because it’s “memorized” your company’s travel policy. It gives you advice on packing, advising do you need a business visa or types of adapters you should carry for international travel. While booking, Carla can give you excellent price-saving recommendations because it can combine flights with trains, for example. It helps you choose the nearest hotel to/from the airport or office and tells you the local weather of where you are traveling to. 

Working of CBT

Let’s take a look at GetThere CBT tool, and understand its working.

GetThere after login looks like this

If you are going to the Airport or coming back from Airport, GetThere is wise enough to auto calculate pick up/drop of time and distance.

In the background, GetThere connect with Sabre GDS (using exposed REST API) to process the further things like fetching service provider who serves in this area with their rates

Based on provider selection, users can proceed with remaining things like providing user-specific details like name. mail id and phone number. This information can be fetched from the profile too.

Payment options like credit cards supported by providers/cash/account transfer etc.

Users can edit the existing booking details/choose different service providers or can choose different payment options. Deletion of itinerary can also be possible.

Targeting the right tool for your company

As you can imagine, the options for CBTs in the business travel world are plentiful and diverse. Picking the right tool for you or your company is an important decision and based on various company-specific factors including time, money, manpower, and flexibility. Specifically SMEs may find that CBTs are useful because they already provide some existing functions and infrastructure, which is critical especially with smaller companies or startups where the business travel process has not yet been fully established.

Whether your company uses mobile-based apps, AI travel assistants, or a fully digital booking service, it is important to have updates of the latest trends in CBTs and adjust your business travel solutions as your company grows. We’ll be sure to keep you updated as new developments occur.

Advantages of CBT

• CBT like GetThere is able to talk directly to GDS like Sabre, so it’s fast and secure, and option oriented.
• Center driven processes– Some of the available CBTs offer business travel planning, travel management, and support all under one roof. Services and information such as booking price, itinerary info, travel expenses, and emergency information (e.g., forecast weather delays) are all accessible in a single digital platform, making business trips a very smooth experience for the traveler.
• Saving Directly The booking autonomy of CBTs reduces workloads from travel agencies.
• Indirect savings. Early booking allows travelers to take advantage of lower fares/rates, while still following with company travel policy.

Compliance of Travel policy

CBTs always take care of increased travel policy compliance by making only policy-compliant options available to employees. Up to date compliance means increased savings because of in-policy booking with the company’s preferred rates. 

Expense handling tools like Travog, DCSplus, ExpenseMate, OnFly will integration with CBT can perform a better job. Saving money is earning it, these tools at the backend connect with respective backend engines, to provide the best possible suggestions based on the traveler, company policy, preferences, and the past buying behavior. This will certainly make it time and money efficient for travelers to buy a trip.

Drawbacks of Corporate Booking Tools

Distributed processes– Couple of CBTs are not “all-inclusive” and won’t offer a number of services that corporate travelers need to use. To keep costs low and trips optimized is difficult now.

Installation costs: CBTs can have high initial implementation costs, depending on the specific CBT’s rates and the size of the business. However, the positive side is these rates can still be lower than those of many TMCs.

Start-up complexity: CBTs are usually compound to set up, requiring expert teams to install and manage the required tool(s). This can lead to an increase in HR costs for SMEs.

Conclusion:

Here at Neova we possess the development and testing knowledge with expertise in travel domain for various GDS system integrations. We provide solutions for Automation for web portals,  SOAP-based web services, and RestAPIs. We have been working on integrating CBT like GetThere and SABRE GDS. We can help you to establish an initial setup and make you Ninja from Novice.

Excited to travel to a destination with your beloved one on a vacation, or to attend some business meetings to crack a million dollars deal, or with some other travel purpose. To have a memorable trip you should be more focused on your destination.

What if you found some magical tool using which you can manage your entire journey like hire a car, book a flight with cozy seats, hotels. Not just it, you can add /delete or change your itinerary as easy as snapping your finger. Here comes a GDS that will help you out with all your travel needs.

Why Apollo GDS ?

Before moving to Apollo GDS, let’s understand the history of Apollo evolution first.

 United Airlines was the airline that came up with  Apollo CRS back in 1971. Almost fifteen years later, Apollo Travel Services became a standalone affiliate of United and was rebranded as Covia™. In 2009, Travelport became a collaboration partner in eNett™, a leading provider of integrated payment solutions for the travel industry.

Travelport combines three GDSs: Apollo, Worldspan, and Galileo. They are all merged into a single Travelport Universal API, the universal API is a package of the following functions:

Expansion (inventory and coverage)

Travelport GDS collects and distributes information across channels on access to airlines, rails, cruises, and hire rental cars. In addition to that, it allows for fetching information from available hotels and tours.

Travelport GDS is the only GDS equally covering all directions and continents. It is evenly represented in the Americas, though to a greater extent in South America, EMEA and the APAC region. In its distribution channel, Travelport combines 650,000 hotel properties, 400+ airline partners, 125 low-cost carriers, car rental units in over 38,000 locations, 50 cruise lines, and 15 railway carriers.

Flights:
Travelport gives access to booking direct flights, connected air and train routes, and ancillary services, such as baggage, meals, and insurance.

Hotels:Apart from basic hotel information and booking, Travelport can offer deals from non-GDS providers: Agoda, Tourico, and others to name a few. It also has support discounts for corporate clients.

Car rentals:
Travelport’s car rental functionality is standards are as follows
search, pricing, images, vehicle details, and cancelation.

Railways:
Travelport is heavily focused on providing combined air and train booking availability, including data on optimal connections with flights, ticketing air-rail as a single ticket, and offering train transfers directly to and from an airport.

API integration

• Air API connect
• Rail API connect
• Travelport rooms
• Fares and ancillaries
• Customer profiles

Travelport offers access to low-cost carriers via a Smartpoint solution. It returns information on branded fares and ancillaries and lists LCCs along with other airlines for quick comparison. The platform is available only for manual booking too via travel agents.

How to Connect to Apollo GDS

• Get IATA or ARC accreditation.
• Pass the GDS terminal training.
• Sign an agreement.
• Negotiate competitive deals.

Defiance of Apollo GDS

While discussing the power of Apollo GDS let’s take a glance at some challenges that we might encounter while using Apollo. Let’s see them one by one

• Option for One Way/Return/Multi-City ( Multi-City search provides an option to select multiple destination cities to search flight and book all flights in a single itinerary)
• Show the list of flights as per the XML Response received from GDS Server based upon search criteria.
• Application of Slice and Dice.
• Show Flight Logo, Flight Name, Flight Number, Segment Information, Departure Details ( City, Date, Time ), Arrival Details (City, Date, Time), Trip Duration, No. Of Stops
• Advance Filter Search
• Show Fare Details like Base Fare, Taxes & Fees, Grand Total Rate
• Show Baggage Information, Penalties Description, Refundable and Non-Refundable details
• Seat Selection Scope

Conclusion

For the last few decades, GDS has provided unparalleled service to airlines because of its property like security, reliability, speed, and accuracy to name a few. If I look at IATA research, what airlines will look in the future are more flexible, robust commerce platforms built on contemporary software and architecture. If GDS evolves to meet the changing needs of the airline industry, it will continue to evolve as it did from the Lazy Susan system of the 1950s, it will survive otherwise it will cease to be relevant.