Agents use 12 sites at any one time, finds Travelport study

Travel agents are switching between an average of 12 applications and websites at any one time according to Travelport.

The company discovered that agents were using hotel, destination, weather and a host of other travel related sites and applications during focus groups and feedback from the seven partners piloting its Universal Desktop technology.

Travelport plans to move its Universal Desktop technology, which aims to aggregate the services agents need on one screen, into beta next April.
The Universal Desktop prototype, unveiled last February, combines search, booking and tracking capability with productivity tools on one screen.

Other features include e-mail, instant messenger, links to favourite websites and travel widgets.

Travelport portfolio director Jason Nash said the pilot phase was to ensure the company was ticking all the boxes in terms of helping agents become more productive.

"We've got to make sure it meets their needs in terms of the different roles they play in the agency."

The first release of the service aims to offer flight booking capability as well as hotel, rail and car-hire in half the time it would traditionally take to book just the flight.

Nash also said that elements such as instant messenger would be integrated in future releases of the technology, although the first version would include internet links and the ability to e-mail itineraries to travellers.

In April, Travelport will extend the service to between 25 and 30 agencies across all locations.

Kayak makes travel search trend data available

Kayak has opened access to the site's travel search data and launched a travel demand benchmark, providing an open source of travel statistics and information from hundreds of millions of travel searches.

Trends data is available for nearly any commercial airport in the world and for hotels in hundreds of the most searched destinations. The company also launched a proprietary travel demand benchmark, the Kayak Travel Index, a statistical model that provides a measure of travel demand from analysis of searches on Kayak sites by modeling data for the average combined hotel and flight prices that people select.

Paul English, Kayak CTO and co-founder said, "people have conducted hundreds of millions of travel searches on Kayak in the past year, generating a tremendous amount of data on travel demand trends." English continued, "we're happy to make this information available to the travel press and to the general public."

Kayak Chief Scientist, Giorgos Zacharia, an accomplished expert in predictive modeling, who developed the Kayak Travel Index™ added, "the index essentially models how much an average traveler is willing to pay to visit a given destination by analyzing search behavior and selection patterns across all destinations searched on Kayak sites."

Related Link: Kayak Trends