‘On-line booking will happen very quickly’

‘On-line booking will happen very quickly’

Champness: planning ahead

SINCE its inception, FSS has been one of the major players in the marketplace for developing and supplying systems to tour operators.

It offers a fully integrated reservations, administration, accounting and back-office system to traditional package tour operators, tailor-made specialists and niche operators, as well as airline consolidators offering discounted scheduled flights.

It began in 1990 as a software company specialising in computer reservation systems for tour operators and developed viewdata software that agents see when searching an operator’s system.

In the mid-1990s, FSS was one of the leading companies involved in creating a seamless link – called ‘transparency’ – between GDSs and viewdata so operators could offer live scheduled seats alongside charters on their viewdata reservation systems.

The transparency, a term coined because the user works in the language of the host system and does not need training in complex GDS codes, allowed an operator to take seats from the GDSs to tailor-make holidays on their own screens.

Prior to this, operators needed a separate terminal and training to access GDSs before making a booking through a separate system.

But the rate of FSS’s past successes could be nothing compared to the future, according to marketing and e-commerce director Ian Champness.

For him, the future lies in on-line bookings and the death of viewdata. At the core of this, he says, is convincing tour operators of the need for change.

“We think it is going to happen quickly. But operators are still only on viewdata, so although agents can now come in over the Internet they cannot book on-line. As a result agents are still booking on viewdata.

“Tour operators think massive changes are needed to their back-office systems but we just need to web enable them. My mission is to convince operators it is possible,” he said.

The changing face of technology has already led to FSS developing its own travel website, nowbookit.com, touted as a mini GDS.

The ‘one-stop travel shop’ brings together inventory normally distributed by GDSs and over viewdata. Package holidays, flights, car hire and insurance can be searched and booked on-line by agents or consumers.

Champness added: “FSS’s Leisure Distribution System combines a search engine with reservations capability and the inclusive tour and scheduled airline distribution channels to provide a bookable, on-line travel service.”

The company has already invested £1 million into the development of client server technology to free tour operators from the constraints of proprietary systems.

The client server system links a database to PCs or web-based client systems, so companies can take on new digital and Internet distribution channels.

Champness believes digital distribution channels will need to be harnessed in future. “When you can book travel over the television it is going to be huge,” he said.