Article by our Sales Director, Chris Gilliland, which appeared in the December 2003 issue of International Tours and Tourism News.

Learning a New Language

XML (Extensible Markup Language) is the ‘Lingua Franca’ of the Computer Industry. It is designed to improve the functionality of the Web by providing more flexible and adaptable information identification, allowing different types of computer systems to communicate in a simple and robust way.

It is because of its simplicity and elegance that all major ‘computer applications’ will employ some form of external communications using XML within the next four years. From that time forward, XML will be the standard way of communicating digital information and it therefore follows that it will be the standard way for communicating digital Travel information i.e. Bookings; availability requests; images; sound and movies.

If we say that within the next 5-10 years all the major booking systems will utilise some form of XML bookability, we can deduce that the next few years are going to be a very busy XML time. Astratis is a company completely immersed in the XML revolution.

Distribution Channels
It is a reasonable assumption that the major Travel booking portals i.e. Last Minute, Opodo and Expedia, will have already undertaken XML development. Astratis is currently enabling its Enterprise Travel Reservation System ‘Taurus’ to have XML bookability and XML availability distribution. The Travel Industry is starting to catch up with other industries by identifying the potential offered by these new technologies and like Astratis, both Travel Agency and Tour Operator system suppliers need to continue to invest time and money in resources and technology, if the industry is to benefit and realize this potential.

Another indication of XML green-shoots is XReservations Ltd. Astratis work with XReservations whom provide a conduit to front-end technologies e.g. on-line booking portals (Lastminute.com) and also the suppliers of Travel Agent systems, Tarsc, Ramesys, Traveltec, Voyager, Comtec and Multicom.

XReservations provide the XML links to the Astratis Reservation system Taurus, allowing for fully interactive communications, bookability and product distribution for the Astratis user base. This is a completely new channel of distribution for the Tour Operators concerned, providing an incremental revenue stream with incredible growth potential at very little cost. In fact, Astratis are currently talking to a number of additional Flight only and Package Tour Operators about replacing current systems that, unfortunately, don’t provide the flexibility, through either commercial or technological restraints, to enable the development in line with these new technologies.

Bookability
Tour Operator, dynamic and bookable Web sites are indeed a massive growth area and obviously a significant advantage lies with the major Tour Operators with strong brand awareness.

Therefore, considerable thought needs to be given to the public and professional awareness of the lesser-known brands of the smaller Operators and Consolidators. Assistance can be provided by the on-line search engines i.e. Google, however, without considerable investment in traditional advertising mediums, there will still be no guarantee that a particular Web site will be found.