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The New Travel Intermediaries

Speaker Transcripts

Rod Cuthbert
Partner
Fox Interactive Media Group

Thank you very much for the opportunity to be here and lest you should think that ABTECH's budget runs to business class travel across the Pacific, it turned out that I was going to be Europe anyway doing some other things, meeting with our friends at IATA etc. so it was a quick trip on the Eurostar to get over here, which wasn't really all that expensive and it really is delightful to get the opportunity to talk to travel industry colleagues.

In fact I'm accompanied here on this trip by a cricket team, you may have noticed. I am interested by the psychology of the press actually who seem to have told everybody in the country that the Australians are going to win by an awful lot and we should brace ourselves for the worst, which I think is actually a pretty neat psychological clue to get the Australians into a false sense of security. In fact last weekend it seemed to be working as we'd lost our first game so that's pretty good. I also, before I start, should admit that I have committed a heinous crime like my forebears who also committed heinous crimes and were sent down to Australia. In fact my great-grandmother on my mother's side was an Irish convict and it appears that the genes are still in my blood because this morning I decided I simply had to steal a little power adapter from the Kensington Hilton and I've got it right here with me so if somebody from the Kensington Hilton comes in a minute you'll know what it's for. But it is my intention, I want to state right now, to return it to them after the presentation this morning so, with that out the way, let's go on and see if we can cover some interesting ground.

It is a global village and sort of interesting that we are a Sydney based company doing work for ??? based in Monaco and IATA who are based in Geneva but it turns out that it's not so unusual for those organisations, particularly IATA and, with the power of e-mail etc, it's very easy to communicate nowadays. In fact it's probably a lot more efficient because you're not near everybody all the time and can go away and do things. So I'm going to talk about this program called Universal Trade and some other initiatives that I think may be of interest to you.

First of all I'll just talk a little bit about UFTAA, to remind you that although ABTA is not a member of UFTAA for principally political reasons I think, there are 103 member countries representing all the ABTAs of the world, except ABTA, the Americans and Germans, who just happen to be the three largest trade groups. Though it really is quite interesting politics, hopefully some of these programs that we are developing will convince them to come back into the fold. Having said that, there are still 300,000 odd agents who fall under the UFTAA banner and UFTAA is the only organisation which can negotiate on a global scale with IATA and other organisations.

You can imagine the difficulty for IATA, who do run a very closed shop on behalf of the airlines, negotiating with ABTA and 103 other countries. It just wouldn't work so they tend to negotiate through a thing called the IUCC, the airlines and the travel agents talking together in some language that they understand but anyway it seems to work quite well. So we are working with both those organisations on this initiative and who are we? We are not at all anything to do with Rupert Murdoch, in fact, I really think we convicts got our own back at you because this morning I didn't have time to read The Times that had been slipped under my door, as I was preparing and packing so on the tube I picked up a discarded Sun and, you know, our days are way behind us - those horrible convict days, but you have to live every day surrounded by the Daily Mail and all the other scuzzy newspapers that Rupert Murdoch has foisted on you. It's a horrible cross to have to bear. We don't have those terrible Rupert Murdoch newspapers out in Australia. He just does it offshore. It's a really good strategy. Anyway, so we're not anything to do with him.

My partner's name is Peter Fox which seemed like a good name to put in our company name and what we do is Internet strategy and publishing for just the travel industry. It's a real sort of niche market but we could employ 1,000 people and work the rest of our lives and I think not cover all the opportunities or do all the things that people seem to want to do in the travel industry. Our customers include groups like UFTAA and ABTA in Australia and other travel agents associations from various countries in our region, quite a few IATA airlines, a whole host of tour operators and wholesalers and many other trade bodies, the licensing group that licences and bonds travel agents and many other trade associations. So we quite often encounter a dynamic in our market where companies will come to us having tried building Internet sites with a sort of pure Internet developer and they have found it difficult to educate them as to what the travel industry is all about because travel industry politics really are quite thick. You seem to need to have an understanding of the vernacular; who is who and who isn't and if you don't get it then it's probably not going to work out right, so specialising in this niche is probably a good thing. It's just occurred to me that either the Hilton could come and get me or I could get thrown out for bad language so maybe I'd just better work on that.

Now I'm really sorry that Neal from Worldview Systems didn't stay because he seemed to be upset that he hadn't insulted anybody. I propose to insult him now by saying that I disagree categorically with his comments about the cost of being on the Internet and being there in a way that is valuable and has value for your company and it is of great interest to me that I heard exactly the same message last week from Microsoft Corporation. The International Marketing Manager, for the Expedia product, gave a presentation in Amsterdam to an UFTAA group and delivered exactly the same message. You have got to have very big pockets and an open cheque book. Don't even bother trying unless you can compete financially with us. Absolute nonsense and, in fact, a very self-serving approach. I really wish he was here so that he could hear all this.

In fact the comments that we hear about these big mega sites are that they are like a Sears & Roebuck catalogue - there are no couturier products in there. There's nothing really interesting in those sites. They're bland. They're sort of overbearing and this is the way you should take your holiday. The Microsoft approach is, here's our wizard and he will help you out and you're not going to find anything special in there. You're not going to be able to sit across the table like you do with a travel agent who tells you about a little boutique hotel in Bali that nobody else knows about that they can get you into because they were there two weeks ago. That's not the way these mega sites operate. They are the very reverse of that. You are going to get to the boutique hotel and find it has 45 storeys and your room faces the car park. And what are you going to do? E-mail Bill Gates? I don't think so. So I think that is an incredibly self-serving message and I would say to any of you, whether you are a tour operator or travel agent or whoever, if you are looking to have a presence on the Internet, you can do it for less than UKL1,000 and you can do something that is valuable to your clients. By using frames technology you can link them off to all the other sites and effectively deliver the weather, currency exchange and the US State Department warnings. It's all out there and you can deliver under a frame that's got your name on it and your customers will say these guys are really good because they've organised the world really well for me.

We do that for a number of our clients in Australia. It doesn't cost a lot of money, it works very effectively and the feedback they get is a lot better than what people see on the Expedia side, which is a ram it down their throat mentality. So I think that is one of the difficult things for American suppliers and I don't think Bruce Bishins falls into this category. I heard his presentation in Amsterdam last week where he basically said this is something we are doing in America and God knows whether it works anywhere else in the world but we've got to follow an American if we are going to use the Internet to solve it. It's very easy to think of this global village concept and say let's deliver systems for the world but, in fact, the very reverse is true. I think what's going to happen is that you will all develop systems that work very well in the UK marketplace and they may have absolutely no application anywhere else and that does not make an invalid solution. We may do things in the Asia Pacific region which particularly relates to the way that we travel, the sort of travel that we want to do, and I doubt very much whether that would be relevant to our friends up in Hong Kong or Singapore or other places where their mentality is quite different. And this is often very difficult for American corporations to envisage. Something that they would do in the great United States of America wouldn't apply everywhere on the globe but it is in fact absolutely the reality, this technology and with our industry.

So, having delivered that long homily, I will now get onto the real presentation which is to look at these UFTAA programs, describe some of the background issues and stress the importance, I think, of just being involved. You can come along to as many of these presentations to learn as you want but you need to go back, if you are a supplier or a travel agent or whatever, and spend a little bit of money and learn something for yourself and it really needn't be all that expensive.

This particular UFTAA/IATA initiative was driven by the very sharp focus on the issue of distribution costs that airlines have had over the last few years. They look at their costs overall - they are in a very tough marketplace - and whilst they see the distribution channels doing wonderful things for them, they look at those commissions, overrides and CRS fees, etc. and say we need to attack these and I don't think travel agents or tour operators should look at that as being an unwholesome activity on behalf of the airlines. Simply good management is their business. Another one of the things that has developed as a problem, certainly in our region and may well be the case up here, is the number of ticketing errors resulting from the decline in education level in the marketplace and the increasing complexity of the IATA rules. So we'll explore that a little bit and see how that neatly fits into this whole thing.

Agencies seem to have taken the collective view, and it's often not a good thing to generalise but I think we will in this case, how really can the Net help me, help the airlines in reducing distribution costs, how can it help me run a more profitable business and improve my business. There is an enormous amount of confusion on behalf of agents, certainly in our marketplace, and I wouldn't be surprised if that wasn't the case here as well.

The airline approach has been much more direct. 245, approximately, IATA carriers but well in excess of that in terms of Web sites. Every IATA carrier has at least one Web site; many of them have three or four. They are all onto their second or third generation. I think some of your carriers here, like British Midland, are really leading the way in testing out how, to look at it negatively, this process of disintermediation works or maybe what they are just doing is saying we need to add another string to our bow, we need to put more weapons in our armoury and one of those weapons perhaps ought to be the ability to reach out directly to consumers and find out how effectively we can do business with them. Certainly the agents in many parts of the world have gone through a process of saying the airlines are terrible people, they hate us, they want to get rid of us but, in fact, I think it's a far more pragmatic approach than that. The airlines are in business to return a profit to their shareholders and they need to do this sort of stuff.

So almost all of the work that you see from airlines related to the Internet thus far is related to reaching out to consumers and that can do a number of things for them. One of things that we are starting to see from airlines in our marketplace and it was really the genesis for this activity that we're involved in, is that airlines said that as well as reaching out to consumers, the Internet is quite an effective way to reach out to our existing distribution channel. Now, in our market, a travel agent receives between 60 and 100 faxes every week from various airlines, with tariff notices and other marketing material. On top of that, they get a lot of fliers over the fax machine and through the mail from the tour operators and suppliers telling you about changing prices, new products, new routes etc. Using fax like that is quite inefficient. It's a user paid sort of system in a way and it is also a supplier paid system in a very big way because in our market there are 2,500 travel agents and if they want to send out a fax three or four times a week with a new tariff on it, it adds up very quickly. So they are spending ritually but collectively, the IATA airlines in our market which is very small, tens of millions of dollars distributing this target information. So we sat down with IATA and said let's look at a way of reducing your costs by testing out whether or not the Internet would be a good way of distributing that kind of information.

Now potentially the airline approach of delivering information over the Internet could be a poor solution for agents. What I mean by that is, if you think about a travel agent coming into the office in the morning and saying, okay, I wonder what's happening in British Airways and logging onto their Web site and getting a whole lot of information. They then have to go to British Midland, then they need to go to Quantas, then they need to go to the other suppliers that they have, then they need to go to the tour operators and car rental firms and, in fact, it will never happen. It's almost like having a multiplicity of fax machines and getting different messages on each or having to change to different TV channels.

Theoretically and on a one to one basis it's a good concept to use the Internet to distribute this type of information out through the channel but the methodology or, I think, the way it would have worked out if we hadn't started to push people down a different route is that it would never have got off the ground because neither the major supplier in the given market, Quantas in our market or BA in your market, would be able to guarantee the travel agent visits their site on a regular basis to collect this information. So it would be almost as bad as it is now. So our approach is to consolidate the airline data and to have a very low cost system which costs the user, that is the travel agent or some other channel partner, absolutely nothing to get password access to go and get this data and costs the airlines and other suppliers very little information to subscribe and be able to put their data up. What the travel agent gets is an environment where he can go on and he can say these are the suppliers that I care about. I only want to see information from them. Visit one site per day or per week or however often they want to do it and a system at the back end will figure what information they need to see. So a single site with unified design. After getting the airlines involved, it's easy then to add other suppliers and to make the site into a one stop source for information.

You may think to yourself, well this is a fairly simple approach; I think good solutions often are quite simple approaches. There isn't stunning software sitting behind this. In fact this is more a matter of the politics of it to get people involved and certainly we're banging our heads up against all sorts of politics because there are a lot of big egos, certainly in the airline industry, and the initial reaction of all the airlines that we've spoken to is well that sounds so easy, why don't we do it ourselves and.

So potentially an issue like this ought to provide us with reduced costs for everybody - travel agents don't have to buy so much fax paper - probably a small cost reduction but the airlines certainly don't need to send out so many faxes, vastly improved communications and, importantly from the suppliers point of view, the ability to brand things quite well and to provide a lot more information than they would be able to over the fax, which is a two-dimensional thing, black and white and pretty bland. Also the ability to penetrate a broader market and we'll talk a little bit about that. So, in this part of the program we came up with a strategy of targeting key offenders and there are things like the tariff notices that the airlines send out very frequently, product fliers but not to try and go for all of the type of printed material that an airline would send out but just target a couple of different things.

So let's imagine how a day might operate and I'll put my Traveland hat on, that's like a travel agency group in Australia that does about UKL500 million worth of annual sales, principally international flight sales. The agency manager would come on line and the first thing he would do whenever he would use the system would be to go into this area, called supply listings, where he can set up a sort of profile of the suppliers that he cares about. So he might say well I sell a lot of seats into Indonesia and I sell a lot of Japan etc, etc and will choose his favourite tour operators, etc and what he's saying there is, effectively, if any of these suppliers have new data, they put up a tariff notice or a marketing release of any sort, I want you to show that to me as soon as I come onto the system. If I particularly need something from Globus or Fly Drive International, I can go and get it but ordinarily I don't sell it, they are not a preferred supplier of mine so I'll find my way to that. I don't want you to clog up the system with that sort of data for me.

So that's something they would do fairly infrequently. What they would do frequently is they would click on the supplier updates button. The system goes away and, as it says here, it generates this page automatically. You come on line and the system says this is Traveland. We know who you are interested in. You are interested in seeing stuff from Quantas, etc. So it creates a page with a synopsis of information which may be of interest. So the agent looks at this and says, okay, over 65 new fares, not interested in that, don't even know where these destinations are. June flyaway fares. Now I really care about that because my customers liked this promotion last year so I'm going to take a look at that.

Now this is the type of data that comes across thousands of fax machines every day and what we've done here is simply take that information using Microsoft Word, stick it into a database and now it gets generated automatically when the travel agent who cares about this comes on line. So this is not by any means rocket science. It's very basic usage of this technology. Circumnavigate round this using the ways you would normally navigate round a Web page. They can choose to print it out, save it on their server for other people in their office to use. We are not really sure how people are going to use this when it gets into operation. What we do know is that, generally speaking, travel agents are far more amenable for a system like this which doesn't generate a whole lot of new paper, is environmentally sound etc, etc.

They then see there's something new from Creative Tours and this agent sells a lot of Cruise Fiji, so they go and take a look at this page as well. It's important to remember that this is not just for airlines. So here's a flier that would normally have come across their fax machine in black and white but now we've got better branding, etc. and, in fact, if the travel agent has one of those 300 odd US$ Canon bubblejet colour printers which are now becoming so prevalent, he can in fact print out a colour flier which features the supplier's logo in colour; it might have a graphic in there with a picture of Fiji or wherever and he can actually put that in the window. And this may be a price change. I'm not sure what happens here but in our market Quantas are very good at making price changes at about 4.45 on Friday afternoon so that none of the tour operators can respond and they can have dramatically better prices in their sort of preferred shops over the weekend. This would effectively allow the tour operator to get that information and respond very quickly. So that's a good thing.

Now the other sorts of things that you could do, and this is where IATA have come into play with some really good ideas, if you had a system like this in place. Let's begin to attack some of the other cost issues in the industry. For instance, there are far too many brochures produced that never make their way into the consumers hands and stay in warehouses. So, it would be good to be able to go onto a page from the suppliers you care about, here are the new brochures and then you could select the ones you want and order the ones you want etc. Then the order gets sent directly to the fulfilment house and they send you out the correct amount. Now, again this is something that would work perfectly well on a one to one basis. You could go to the Insight Web site, the coach tour company, and you could look at their new brochure page and find this out but, speaking pragmatically, it's unlikely that a travel agent is going to visit all of his suppliers sites. It's going to be something he does very infrequently. That's why aggregating all this content together in one site is a good idea.

Another real cost within the travel industry is simply the cost of communicating via telephone between all the different parties. E-mail is a fabulous way to communicate messages. One of the problems is that you need to know people's addresses so what we're doing with this system is putting up directories. So, for instance, if I want to find somebody at Air New Zealand, in their head office, in their marketing department, I would just select that and it would come up with a list of people who are there and then I can file an e-mail to any of those people. It's actually a fairly low cost thing for suppliers and travel agents to maintain a database as to who their key people are and what there e-mail addresses are. It's probably something they do internally already but when you roll that out across the industry as a whole, it becomes quite valuable.

In fact, in Australia we are quite lucky that via the CRS, every travel agent in Australia has access to e-mail, full Internet e-mail. It's not really full Internet e-mail because they can't do attachments and things. Attachments cause quite a shudder. Just to digress here for a second, amongst the airlines who worry about one agent sending a message out to all the rest of the agents saying, I'm getting screwed over by carrier X. Let's have a moratorium on selling their product for 48 hours or something like that. And, in fact, this was tested recently when an airline reduced the commissions on domestic sales from 5% to 4% and nobody admits to using this new mechanism to communicate out to all the agents but I can tell you within three weeks, they put the commissions back up to 5% again. Communications within the industry actually changed and I think that's an interesting outcome of all this new technology.

You can do other things like ordering your IATA tickets etc, etc. We'll just spend a minute looking at this from the supplier point of view and we'll go in as an airline. Airlines can do all the same sorts of things that agents can do but perhaps, most importantly, they can also maintain a data base of travel agents so that they can manage who sees what. It is the case with all sorts of suppliers that they have different levels of pricing for different types of agents, whether they are preferred or not, so in this case Cathay have three levels of preferred type of agent. Here's the data for Traveland pulled out of the IATA/BSP database. What this means is that when Cathay put a tariff up, they would put up three different levels of it, three different pricing levels, and this is where they control who sees what level. That's actually quite a difficult to do when using a third party fulfilment type organisation so they have to make sure they send the right fax out to the right agent so everybody sees the right price.

It's quite a complex thing and it's always the case that the wrong prices go to places and the sales manager from travel agency group B is calling up saying I see you've got a really good deal for travel agency group A which we'd like to be a part of. So this is probably a more effective way of doing it and lest you think this is just about airlines, just take a look at Europcar. I'm just looking at their current rates that are in the system. The Internet really does lend itself well to this type of information delivery. In Australia we literally have no idea what a Fiat Cinquecento looks like. It's small and we're used to bigger cars down there generally so it's good for consumers to be able to see this sort of information. If you've ever looked at a CRS screen and tried to figure out how to get information on a Cinquecento, you should know how completely ineffective the CRS is for that type of information delivery. So there are some really fundamental reasons why the Internet is a good way to do this and as you can imagine that a red Cinquecento looks a lot better there on the screen than it would on a fax or any other way.

So that's a little into where we are so far and I want to tell you that we have had pretty good but cautious support from all of the key players. We are going to launch this thing in a little while and the most important thing is that we have got really strong support from IATA. IATA see the sense in this. Those of you who know your CRS history will probably know that about 10 or 12 years ago IATA tried very strongly to have a single unified CRS for the whole industry but that idea got killed off by, I think, American Airlines. You might want to correct me on that Bruce but I think it was almost certainly American Airlines who forced IATA to back down from their plans. They haven't forgotten the lessons they learnt at that time that it absolutely is the case that if any industry initiative rather than a commercial initiative comes to bear and there's going to be benefits all around the industry rather than the lopsided results which Bruce, I think, talked about earlier on and pointed out so clearly to you. So we are launching this sometime in July in our market in Australia and then we plan to progressively roll it out to other markets that see benefit in it and we will have four or five airlines which is really all we want to have, about 50 or so Internet connected agents and a dozen or so other types of suppliers and at the end of it our goal is to be able to sit down as a group and say what do we think about this medium; if we extrapolate these figures out to 45 on-line carriers in Australia and say a couple of hundred suppliers and 2,000 agents, would we collectively be a doing a better job, would our lives be easier, would we have saved any money, would we have taken some of the pressure off the pressure points in the industry. So when Graham and I were discussing whether or not I should come over here at great expense to you and speak, I said it really is a very pragmatic approach. We don't want to come here and try and sell you something, we just want to tell you about something we are doing that some of the trade bodies are involved in which I think is interesting and, if nothing else, it may serve to stimulate initiatives of a similar nature which may be of value to you because I do think you need to think on a new level.

Now I'm going to talk for a little while about an allied initiative that is also quite interesting and related to the problem with education in the industry. When I first looked at the IATA fares and ticketing course, I was horrified and then full of admiration for anybody who has actually got an IATA fares and ticketing accreditation. We will look in a moment at the higher intermediate points rule and those of you who wonder what I am talking about, will then understand very clearly why one should be full of admiration for these people.

In our market we have a serious problem in that the level of education taken as a whole is not increasing. In fact, the skill level and people's ability to remember these complex rules is falling as they become more reliant on CRSs and as time progresses and their minds are filled up with other mindless crap such as the X files and whatever else Rupert Murdoch has for us. The Net result of that is that the airlines are carrying quite a heavy economic burden in terms of agency errors because they are having to process through because Nancy made a mistake with a round-the-world fare and she was actually UKL300 off and something needs to be done about that and something does get done. It's just one of those things that builds up over time and it's built-up to a stage in our market where it's a really big problem. So the BSP, agency group and ourselves got together and said let's see if we can develop something which would give the agency incentive to re-educate themselves, which is clearly a good thing, and also help the airlines. That first point, providing further incentive for the agency to embrace this technology is really key. The Australian Federation of Travel Agents are involved and I really do commend this activity, in fact, I began discussions with Graham and ABTECH yesterday to see if there is some way that we can roll what we've done so far into your marketplace and I would be happy if you would give any thoughts on that as time goes by, once you've seen what it is that I'm going to show you.

One of the things we did is that we looked really hard at why, if you are a consultant or the manager of an agency, you might not want somebody to go away and do a refresher course for fares and ticketing. And that is, if you are a working consultant, if you are at your desk and on the phone, you are earning commission and making money. To send that person away to a college for three or four days has a cost associated with it, say $400 or whatever. But there is a far greater cost in terms of lost commission. Because if they are there, they can't be here and then the customer is likely to go somewhere else. So that opportunity cost is typically a disincentive for people to maintain their education level and that's what we are talking about here. We are talking about people who are in the industry already, who need to be continually educated but there's just no time for it. So this is the analysis. We said here are the costs and it really doesn't matter whether it's dollars, yens or pounds, you can see theoretically we ought to be able to save them a lot of money and if they could do a course during their lunch hour, before work, after work, at home in an evening for say a month or two and still get the same result re-educating themselves, that would be a win situation for everybody. Paradigm is a really horrible word but it's a really good word actually for where most of the work went in to this. These are all the things that Jenny types, directional minimum fare checks, prepaid tickets in the MCL, all that sort of stuff, and higher intermediate points I think is right up the top of the list.

IATA's rule is so complex that we had to put a plain English definition and a rule in as well because the rule itself is not quite unintelligible but it doesn't flow off the tongue so the first thing we did, we're working with a travel college here, is to redeliver the rules to the consultant. You can see that the consultant can roll around this thing and look at the various parts of the rule, the exceptions, the plain English rule. He can then look at what the exception is. By exception I mean IATA have the rule but then there are exceptions. This rule states that in this case, for instance, we've got a journey which beings in Sydney and goes to Bucharest and it's via Moscow. The consultant needs to check all the intermediate points to see that in fact Sydney-Moscow is not a higher fare than Sydney-Bucharest and if Sydney-Moscow is a higher fare even though Bucharest is the end point, you have to ticket the whole trip at the Sydney-Moscow fare except if the travel originates in the former Russian republics west of the Urals. Now if that's not arcane and difficult to remember then I don't know what is. That's just one example of the type of rules that consultants need to remember and take into account when they do a round-the- world trip.

This is the sort of thing when the ticket goes back into the airline for auditing, they look at it, it's their job, they've got the rule there right in front of them, they say fails the hip check. So what we've done here is provide quite an interesting paradigm or methodology for the consultant to work through this. There are all sorts of explanations all the way through, there are help me buttons. If they're not sure about say what is area two, they can click on area two and the glossary will pop up and be there for them at all times. We have tested this out with quite a lot of consultants and they like this methodology that we've devised where everything is available at the click of a single button but the screen actually changes quite a lot. It's a big shift from a CRS screen with a command line to this point and click blocks of windows popping up and generally the response we get is that this is a lot of fun and I'm actually going to have fun re-educating myself which is exactly the sort of result we would be looking at.

This course that I'm showing you here is a course that we are building right now called the IATA Fares and Ticketing Refresher Course. It's designed specifically for people who have done fares and ticketing before and want to re-educate themselves and for people who don't have the time or the wherewithal to do the whole course but would like to know how it works so they can in fact write those tickets even though they're not supposed to because they haven't done the course.

The underlying issue here is taking the pressure off another distribution point in the channel. It's a real sore point for airlines in our marketplace and because of this initiative, the airlines really appreciate the fact that the agency groups, on their side of the industry, are doing something about that problem. We're going to be rolling it out in early July and, as I said, we're working both with IATA and groups like ABTECH in other markets, training groups, whose business it is to deliver this type of training material to the marketplace.

The summary I offer you is that whilst 18 months ago I think travel agents and others in the industry were really concerned about what affect the Internet would have and whether this incredibly long five syllable word, disintermediation, was something set to really try to take away a major portion of their business and pass it to Bill Gates or somebody else.

In fact, I think it's now quite clear that the Net can benefit everybody in the existing channel today. If you are in the travel channel, you own relationships, you own customers and this is something that the new players don't own. They own software or some other thing and it's not as valuable as what you have. But in order to get the result that you want out of the Internet which really is a stunning new technology for this industry much more than it is for any other industries, you cannot afford to sit on your hands. I think that's the lesson we are learning in our marketplace.

You have to be involved and influence the outcomes or else, as sure as night follows day, it is very clear to us that the CRSs and others and the airlines etc have very deep pockets and they are the ones who spend all the time researching and coming involved and testing, etc, then you're going to get the sort of result that you live with today which is a very unbalanced brace of technology tools for you to use that you had no role in formulating and no control over them. The opportunity is right here, right now, to get involved and to influence the outcomes and have something that's far more balanced and works better for everybody. But in order to do that, you need to get involved.

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