The App is being designed to allow potential patients to select a procedure that they may need in the near future, ranging from minor cosmetic surgery to major procedures such as hip replacement. The App will then offer the patient comparisons of the average cost of the procedure domestically compared to several overseas destinations at accredited hospitals. The patient will have the option to learn more about specific hospitals and other related accommodations through rich content, including medical specialties and videos. If the patient chooses, he will be assigned a case manager to take him through the process of reviewing options and ultimately booking the procedure along with travel and accommodations, all through Global Health Voyager.

“In today’s healthcare environment, patients are taking greater control over their medical decisions. They are aware of available domestic and international options. In many cases it benefits the patient to have a procedure done elsewhere, after weighing the cost, recovery time, and quality of service,” said Ali Moussavi, CEO of Global Health Voyager.

Global Health Voyager continues to add state-of-the-art medical facilities to its network, providing patients with a comprehensive list of institutions world-wide where they can seek high quality medical care. The primary variable is the level of care followed by the cost associated with the trip and the procedure. An added benefit of medical travel is the fact that the patient and his/her companion(s) will be able to take advantage of luxurious accommodations for recuperation, as well as attractive opportunities for sightseeing and relaxation.

Last year, Amadeus launched, in partnership with airconomy Total Demand, a business intelligence tool which delivers detailed key performance indicators on passenger demand to help benchmark network strengths and weaknesses. Total Demand can, for example, help carriers plan and develop networks that respond to true passenger needs and behaviour, as well as maximise profitability on existing routes and in the development of new ones.

Analysis by airconomy provides sophisticated demand data for any city-pair in the world, i.e. how many passengers are booking certain routes, even to the detail of itinerary and airline. Based on advanced computational intelligence, sources for airconomy’s calculations include low-cost carriers, airline direct online sales as well as the GDS distribution channel.

After the acquisition airconomy will be run as a separate business incubator to develop ideas for new market intelligence products; Amadeus will commercialise the new products and handle on-going product management.

For more information, please visit: http://www.amadeus.com/amadeus/x204274.html and http://www.amadeus.com/blog/06/07/where-are-the-growth-hot-spots-in-air-travel/

The survey also highlights the challenges travel agents face in the selling of these services, amid their own pressures to grow revenues, reduce costs and increase productivity.

The unbundling of fares and services in recent years has seen the growth of ancillary products such as checked baggage, meals, lounge passes and upgrades. Agency respondents were asked to specify how this change has impacted their businesses. Top impacts included confusion around what services were offered by each airline, productivity and the need to offer these services to remain a full-service agency. Only 16 percent of respondents saw unbundling as an opportunity to charge or increase fees and 44 percent of respondents said they did not impose additional charges for booking optional services.

Travelport found that agencies would be more interested in selling optional services if the process was more efficient. Survey respondents indicated that booking optional services currently required approximately 29 percent more time. Presently some services are available through the GDS while others are sold via airline websites or by phone. The findings indicated a strong demand for a single aggregated source of information and sales capability and the GDS was listed as the most preferred channel to book and sell optional services by 70 percent of respondents.

The GDS also ranked highly with agents when asked if they were interested in having the GDS assist them in accommodating the offering of unbundled services, with 84 percent of respondents saying it would be a considerable benefit. The top two reasons cited were time savings and improved service for customer.

The majority of agencies (77 percent) are currently booking additional services for their customers compared to just 8 percent of agencies who said they didn’t offer these services. Reasons cited for not offering these services varied, with agents in Europe reporting that ‘it doesn’t generate any additional revenues’ (41 percent), whereas in the Americas, 33 percent of agents said ‘most services are not available for agency booking’.

Respondents were also asked to define the value they place on having branded fares available for sale via the GDS. Branded fares are fares that are bundled together with optional services, such as preferred seat assignments and checked baggage fee. Agents indicated that branded fares would enable them to offer a full service to clients, as well as allow them to stay competitive with airline websites.

“This research offers valuable insights on how travel agencies view and sell airline ancillary services. Agents understand that as the airline product continues to evolve and ancillaries form an increasingly significant role in the purchase decision and buying process, travel customers continue to look to agents to support them in purchasing itinerary solutions,” said Fergal Kelly, Travelport’s Vice President, Content.

“Travelport is continuing its work with airlines and other travel providers on a wide range of merchandising capabilities to support the evolution of new products and strategies for distribution through the GDS. This has included the investment and development of products such as Travelport Universal Desktop and Travelport Universal API which enable the sale of ancillary products and services through an integrated, simple and uniform platform.”

Travelport’s Merchandising Survey was conducted with 610 travel agencies in 12 countries across Asia Pacific, Europe, the Americas, the Middle East and Africa.

Travix has created a solid reputation in the online travel industry by offering discounted airfares with its brands in Europe, North America and Asia. Travix manages an extensive portfolio of travel-focused websites operating under the brand names of CheapTickets, Vliegwinkel.nl, Flugladen, BudgetAir, Vayama and Easytobook. Amadeus started providing best-in-class low fare search and full IT shopping solutions (inclusive of back office solutions) to CheapTickets in 2001. Today, Travix recognises Amadeus´ valuable contribution to CheapTicket´s growth and success, and expands Amadeus´ expertise and global reach to the whole set of brands that make up Travix.

Furthermore, Travix will benefit from Amadeus’ Extreme Search breakthrough technology, a unique inspirational shopping solution for online travel agencies that revolutionises the way  travellers search for air travel online. It provides invaluable insights for online travel agents into customer search behaviour and enables travellers to search for travel suggestions using open search criteria such as geography, budget, activity rather than the traditional origin, destination and date combination. With full integration into the booking flow, provided by Amadeus Master Pricer, the traveller is engaged into booking directly from the pre-search environment and the sale is secured swiftly and seamlessly all on the same website.

Raymond Vrijenhoek, President, Travix, commented, ¨The successful relationship between Travix and Amadeus dates back to 2001 when Amadeus started providing content and IT services to our online brand CheapTickets. Since our business expanded globally earlier this year, it was clear that Amadeus was the partner of choice to help bring the business to the next level for content and IT services. We look forward to expanding our fruitful partnership over the next four years.¨

Stephane Durand, Director, Online & Leisure, Amadeus, stated: “We are delighted to expand our strategic relationship with Travix, so that the rest of the brands in the Travix portfolio can now benefit from Amadeus´ content, technology and performance worldwide. As the global technology partner to the industry, Amadeus has invested heavily to develop innovative solutions to better support its online travel agency customers, to help them tackle the challenges to come.¨

In addition, passengers can now select up to four different classes of booking, offering enhanced flexibility to meet their individual travel needs. The new booking options are offered on a range of tariffs. Having enhanced its footprint in the UK with increased twice-daily Monday to Friday services on the London City-Bern route (which will be one year old at the end of March), SkyWork’s new ‘SkyExecutive’ service offers an allowance of up to two 8kg carry-on bags, 20kg of checked luggage and a fully refundable ticket on cancellation (with the exception of the credit card fee). Alternatively, passengers may re-book a ticket without incurring any additional charges.

SkyWork hopes to expand the online flight booking system in the future to include additional features and benefits for passengers.

www.flyskywork.com

At 25 of January in the applications store AppStore appeared a new version of Toozla for the iPhone.

The current update is the most significant over the past two years. The application received: a fundamentally new design, modification of algorithms of work with content, more convenient access to stories and a map for navigation in an unfamiliar city. The map is not only convenient to walk with around the city, it also allows users to see the location of important objects and choose the direction of movement toward the highest concentration of audio guides. It is worth recalling that the system contains over 2 million audio tracks in 16 languages.

“Adding a map to the iOS application was on the first place in our plans. Toozla for Samsung bada, Nokia Symbian and MeeGo has a map for a long time, so it’s necessity has been confirmed in practice. We also wanted Toozla for iPhone to be not only functional but beautiful either, so we also planned redesign for this version of the application.” – commented marketing director of Toozla Chichinkina Alesya.

Toozla is a russian IT company. Toozla develops global multilingual project for independent travelers, tourists, city gamers, people who love to travel, or just sightseeing.

Toozla is a technology leader in augmented reality for the tourist market. Toozla technologies are revolutionizing in relationships between travelers and places of recreation. Toozla is an interactive mobile audio guide. It is available worldwide for mobile tourist. Details about the company can be found at http://www.toozla.com

Travelport, the business services provider to the global travel industry and Cimber Sterling, the Danish-based airline, have today jointly announced the launch of a new service that will enable Travelport-connected travel agents to book pre-paid bags on Cimber Sterling flights.

Cimber Sterling operates more than 1,000 flights per week and carries 2.5 million passengers per year to domestic and European destinations.
“Travelport is committed to working with airlines and travel agents to provide access to various ancillary services and we are delighted to have launched this innovative tool for Cimber Sterling,” said Mathias Andersson, Country Manager Travelport Nordics. “We support the ATPCO ancillary services standards, but can also offer API-based models to address airline’s individual requirements”.

Carsten Jensen, Director Business Systems & Industry Relations, Cimber Sterling added “Providing our travel agency customers with the ability to book our full offering is a key aim for Cimber Sterling. We are delighted with Travelport’s ability to work with us to deliver a service that fits our needs perfectly and enables our customers to book this extra service”.

Sabre’s Travel Settlement Services is available to UK TMCs and is powered by Conferma, the provider of travel and expense (T&E) booking, settlement and reconciliation solutions.

Currently, UK-based intermediaries book their clients’ hotels using the credit card stored in the traveller profile.

Consequently, guarantees and payment settlement must be performed manually through a multi-step, time-consuming process.

With Sabre’s Travel Settlement Services, a virtual-credit card is created at the time of booking and is automatically sent to the supplier to guarantee the reservation.

At check-out, the virtual credit card is charged, and Travel Settlement Services automatically reconciles the booking to the payment.

The virtual credit card securely automates global supplier payment and reconciliation processes, bringing together the travel and payment transaction at the point of sale with a slick and easy-to-use system.

TMCs will save valuable time and money on manual payment processes, such as the hotel bill-back payment scheme, and decrease their vulnerability to fraud.

Key benefits include:

• Enables access to multiple payment and card partners
• Provides visibility of total spend
• Ensures travel policy compliance
• Eliminates risk of payment card fraud
• Increases productivity and reduces costs by replacing the manual, time-consuming processes with an automated, paperless process
• Accelerates billing and collections by simplifying the client invoice process
• Enhances data management capabilities by providing online transaction reporting that links payments directly to specific bookings

Harald Eisenaecher, Sabre Travel Network’s senior vice president for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, said, “Virtual payments eliminate expensive and time-consuming, labour-intensive reconciliation processes within the TMC.

“It will put an end to hotel bill-back, and minimise agency credit and fraud risk. The technology will save agencies time and money, allowing them to focus on servicing their travellers.”

Simon Baker, chief executive of Conferma, said, “Travel Settlement Services will enable more TMCs to benefit from our growing network of world-class banking partners and our acclaimed virtual card delivery, reconciliation and settlement technology.”

Travel Settlement Services is a fully-automated process in the Sabre Red Workspace and is fully PCI compliant.

The UK market is the first to benefit from the virtual payment technology. The service will be rolled out in other global markets throughout the year.

The problems also hit travel agents and airline check-in desks at airports.

The system crash happened in the late evening in eastern Australian time, a quieter period. It was also quieter in the Northern Hemisphere, being winter and not a holiday peak. But passengers were delayed at check-in as staff had to key in passport details manually, being unable to scan the documents.

One report said the delays came close to bringing flights in Finland to a standstill.

As is usual, the first complaints surfaced vis Twitter. “Goddammit, whole european flight reservation system down, and my flight to Stuttgart canceled,” tweeted user Sakari Hyoti.

“The systems incident has been fully resolved,” the company said. “All Amadeus systems are now operating normally. Amadeus regrets any inconvenience this incident may have caused.”

Just two months ago, Qantas check-in staff were reduced to writing out boarding passes by hand after a sudden glitch paralysed the airline’s check-in system.

Amadeus later accepted responsibility for that outage, issuing a statement: “Amadeus can confirm that the issues related to printing of boarding passes from our departure control system experienced this morning have now been fully resolved.

“We are currently investigating the cause of the issue that occurred today and regret any inconvenience caused to our customers. We remain committed to providing the industry’s leading information technology services that support many airlines around the world.”

It’s not the fist time Qantas has struck that sort of glitch. Widely publicised system failures caused major delays for the airline in November 2009 and January 2010, forcing manual check-in. Amadeus was reported to have reached a private agreement with Qantas following those failures.

Judging from yesterday’s problems, a few kinks may still have to be ironed out.

Ironically, the latest glitch struck not long after Amadeus announced it had created the world’s first interline Electronic Miscellaneous Document (EMD) link. The application of EMD to interline partnerships allows participating airlines to facilitate payment for and delivery of ancillary services across their partnerships and alliances.

Written by Peter Needham

As part of the agreement, travel agencies and corporations will have real-time access to Virgin Australia and Virgin Australia International content without surcharges, ensuring the most accurate shopping and booking experience as part of the efficiency of the Sabre GDS.

The distribution agreement with Sabre goes into effect immediately, and builds on Virgin Australia’s upgrade to Sabre’s AdvanceConnect, providing both seamless availability and interactive sales to agencies and corporations. Additional merchandising capabilities will include fare families, and ancillary sales fulfillment with Electronic Miscellaneous Document (EMD) to provide travel agencies and corporations with significant process efficiency and flexibility across sales, settlement and reporting.

“Sabre is committed to helping Virgin Australia realize its business goals by delivering powerful tools and solutions, like the vast and efficient Sabre GDS, so they can reach the largest number of customers with the products and services travelers want,” said Hans Belle, vice president of Sabre Travel Network – Asia-Pacific. “Virgin Australia is a terrific partner that truly understands and appreciates the value of the Sabre GDS and we look forward to doing all we can to help the airline flourish.”

Virgin Australia joins a number of airlines around the world, including Air New Zealand, United Airlines, US Airways, Virgin America, Etihad, Alitalia, Finnair and South African Airways, who are or are planning to leverage Sabre’s innovative merchandising solutions in order to efficiently market and sell ancillaries to the largest number of travelers.