AgentWare To Deliver Hotel Inventory To Travel-Agent DesktopsAgentWare To Deliver Hotel Inventory To Travel-Agent Desktops

An agreement reached this week between two travel-technology suppliers is expected to result in travel agents getting desktop access to more hotel inventory. AgentWare Inc., a supplier of agent-facing search and booking tools, said it will integrate private rates negotiated by CNG Travel Group plc with more than 25,000 hotels, none of which is listed in any of the global distribution systems used by agents.

The deal pushes AgentWare, which had been focused exclusively on providing airfares not listed in those distribution systems, into the hotel market for the first time. And it will give travel agents what they're always looking for: more choices for their clients. "It means that the application gets richer and more diversified in terms of content," AgentWare CEO Ivan Bekkers says. "It really evens out the travel cycle with the second-most-important component for us." AgentWare plans to make the CNG inventory available to its travel agency clients by midsummer.

AgentWare's Trip Console application sits on the agent's desktop and detects when a search of any of the global distribution systems is launched, and it goes to the sites of airlines that don't list fares in those systems, overlaying a second window that offers up those additional results. Agents can then complete bookings through the Trip Console interface, which triggers the transaction on the airline's site in the background. It also integrates the resulting information with the agency's back-end accounting and customer-relationship-management systems. AgentWare has direct connections into the reservations systems of AirTran Airways and Canadian carriers CanJet Airlines and Conquest Airlines, and has permission from JetBlue Airways and other low-cost carriers in the United States to query their sites for fares. Bekkers is hoping to add Southwest Airlines to that list soon.

CNG's negotiated rates aren't likely to be better than the corporate rates enjoyed by midsize and large companies, and even if the rates are better, some may levy cancellation fees, making them of little interest to business clients, Forrester Research analyst Henry Harteveldt says. "Corporate travel managers are trying to educate travelers that the cheapest rate isn't always the best," he says.

Still, the addition of hotel inventory to AgentWare's offering is good news for travel agents, who will be able to provide more hotel options to clients, Harteveldt says. "It allows them to say, 'Yes, I can help you,' more to their customers." Those most likely to reap the benefits include small businesses that aren't able to negotiate for corporate rates and larger companies whose employees are traveling to areas where a corporate rate isn't available. Harteveldt says having hotel content also should help AgentWare compete more effectively with corporate travel offerings from Expedia, Orbitz, and Travelocity.